Funny Signs

English is everywhere in South Korea, especially in the cities. T-shirts, store signs, soda bottles, you name it. Most of the time the English text makes sense, but sometimes something gets, shall we say, "lost in translation." Check out the pictures here. I'll be taking more photos as time goes on. Maybe this will evoke happy memories in those of you who have visited Korea recently.

Funny Signs

I do feel kind of hypocritical criticizing Korean English when I had my first 3-hour Basic Korean language class today and found out I didn't know the basics of even really simple greetings. Basic level is a step above Beginner, which is where I would be if I didn't know how to read and write hangul, the indigenous Korean alphabet which Jared Diamond described as "elegant." I agree with him - it's pretty intuitive once you get the hang of it, and there are far fewer weird spelling conventions than English. Of course, the simplicity of the writing system is offset by the complexity of the language itself, which has several different registers of formality, lots of case endings that follow their own phonological (i.e. sound) rules, and a subject-object-verb sentence structure. I can barely make sentences that have an object in them - sentences with embedded phrases are way beyond me right now (i.e. "I wish ..." or "I think ..." or "It's true that ..." as opposed to "I like kimchi" or "It's raining"). The professor for the Basic class is great and clearly has had a lot of experience teaching beginners. There are only 17 people in my class, which is also helpful, although it's by far the largest of the classes I'm taking.

The other two classes I've picked are "Understanding Hallyu: Globalization and Nationalism" and Intro to Economics. Hallyu is the Korean name for the so-called Korean Wave, the catch-all term for the explosive recent spread of Korean popular culture to all of East Asia and beyond. My interest in this topic was ignited in particular by Professor Eckert's excellent history class "The Two Koreas" as well as Steven Colbert's televised "feud" with Korean pop singer Rain. Colbert, who is currently my favorite television personality, actually created his own K-pop music video to compete with Rain where he tries to dance b-boy (aka breakdance) style and actually sings in Korean (the video has subtitles). The video itself starts around 3:55.



There's an interesting article here on the Korean reaction to Colbert's video.