I’ve written before about how frustrated I’ve become trying to find Korean television dramas with English subtitles that I can watch on my computer. It really does help me learn Korean to watch, but I’m just not able to really get enough of what’s going on to watch without subtitles, yet.
I’ve had a couple of false starts, where I find a program and watch a few episodes, but then I can’t get the rest of the episodes with subtitles, so I’ve taken to finding shows and downloading all the episodes before watching them. What I end up finding becomes somewhat random – i.e. I’m not really watching shows because they appeal to me but rather because they’re the ones I can find.
One show I started watching recently because I’d gotten all the episodes is called “마녀유희” [ma-nyeo yu-hui = “Witch Yoo-hui” in official translation]. It’s a romantic comedy series (or really, mini-series in US parlance) from 2007. A too-young female business executive (heir to some rich family presumably) has a bad personality and this ne’er-do-well medical-school dropout (and wannabe French chef) does a pygmalion on her.
That should be enough to get the gist of the story. You can read an atrociously written summary at the wikithing. The whole connection to an actual witch-based fairy tale is tenuous at best (mostly played up in the intro to each episode). I had been hoping for something brilliantly conceived like the Hansel and Gretel meta-tale movie I liked so much a few years back.
But, so… I’ve been watching that. It’s entertaining, anyway.
