Category: 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Caveat: Book of Endings

Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

In trying to understand Korean, it's all about the endings, I've decided.

Sometimes it seems that the Korean language boils down to:  tens of thousands of nouns (seemingly mostly borrowed from Chinese or English), a few hundred verbs, a couple dozen pronouns and fossilized adverbs, and all the rest is endings, endings, endings.  Endings.

The endings can change nouns to verbs, verbs to nouns, verbs to adjectives, verbs to adverbs and adnominals, etc., etc.  Verb endings convey social status of speaker, listener, subject and object, as well as mood, degrees of certainty, connectivity, causality, tense, etc.  Other endings convey noun roles in sentences (subject, object, topic, etc.), the peculiar configurations of counted things (flat, round, mechanical, etc.), and so much more!. 

But the problem is, endings are hard to look up.  My best resource is the pretty-good index in the book, Korean Grammar for International Learners.  But there are so many variations on the endings, that sometimes the index falls short.  I have to go guessing and fishing around.  A lot of time, endings just stay mysterious. 

What's needed is a "Book of Endings" to help learners make sense of it all.  Maybe some kind of novel organization on the basis of "hangul order" but from the ends of words?  Or a website with the ability to look things up.  The online dictionaries sometimes parse endings if you type in whole forms, and will lead you to roots, but they don't let you figure out the endings themselves. 

Just over the last few days, here some endings I've run across and tried to make sense of.

-서 subordinating causal connector, meaning "… V so … V"

-면 subordinating conditional connector, meaning "if/when … subV … mainV "
when it is followed by 좋다 as a main verb (좋아요 (pres) / 좋겠어요 (future) / 좋았어요 (past)), it indicates "wish, hope"

-고 coordinating connector ("and"), but also
-고 싶다 "I/you want to …"
-고 싶어하다 "he/she/they want to"
-고 있다 progressive

-ㄴ / -는 the wonderful relativizer of anything (ie. adjective-o-matic — I tend to think of it as a past/present participle, but that's not really how it works)

-ㄹ 것같다 "… looks like…"

-ㄹ까요 propositive "shall we…?" "do you think we should…?";  opinion "do you think that…?"; used also for presenting alternatives

Some other phrases
사람들이 많아요 "there are many people"

바쁜데요 "[I'm sorry] I'm busy" (sorriness conveyed by the -ㄴ데- ending)

My friend Mark said in a recent email that it looked like I was gaining fluency in Korean.  No way.  So far to go…

Caveat: 블로그!

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / My Photos / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

내일은 어린이날이에요. 재가 일할 필요없어요. 어쩌면 다시 긴 산책할 거예요. 이번 저녁에 파스타를 먹고 있고 맛있어요. 그리고 음악을 들어요. 한국어를 연습하기 위하여 저는 이것을 쓰고 있어요.
A random picture from a bus ride: the National Assembly (legislature) building on 여의도 (Yeouido Island).
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Caveat: 내리는 문’입니다

Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

What’s with the apostrophe?
I saw “내리는 문’입니다” on the back door of a bus, facing out. It makes perfect sense: Nae-ri-neun mun-ip-ni-da (roughly, “exiting door is” meaning “this is an exit door”).  Korean typically and in very standard fashion will attach a “be-verb” (in this case, ip-ni-da, which is a highly formal and deferential form used for public discourse) to any noun, to make a sentence. The noun is in turn modified by a relativizer (or adjectivizer) of the “exit” verb.
But, there’s a little apostrophe, between the mun and the ip. Why? [imagine this pronounced in a weird Homersimpsonish risingtone]
So… but who thunk to put an apostrophe? Korean doesn’t use apostrophes. I’ve never seen that before. It makes a weird kind of sense, but it doesn’t follow the rules of Korean orthography and word-separation that I’ve been exposed to. It was definitely an apostrophe – the font showed one of those little blobs with a tail hanging down, just like an elevated comma. It can’t be a mistake, can it? It’s some kind of westernish orthographic affectation, I suspect. Makes it “look cool,” somehow.
Here is a backlog of “Notes for Korean,” some random vocab words I should be memorizing:
발송중 = delivery . [in the course of / in the middle of]
현재 = current; present day; nowadays
-령 = dominion, land
동인도 [east india] = indonesia
옛 = old, former
회사 = company, firm
표준= standard, as in, 표준어 = standard language / linguistic norm
추가 = addition / -하다  add to, append, supplement
마치다 = be done, finish, complete
기타 = the rest; and others; and the like
대학입학= university admission
선배=senior, elder
잠시=shortly, later / 잠시후 =after a short while
실패는 성공의 어머니이다 = failure success’s mother is.
Picture: walking from work toward 주엽 subway station in the rain, at about 5 pm today. It was so greeny and beautiful.
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Caveat: 이해해 수 없는 한국말은 많아요

The Wonders of Work / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Lately it seems like I keep stumbling on Korean that my dictionaries can’t help me to understand.
Consider the notice found in the lower right on the webpage at the grade-entering application at work.
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I know from context that 등록된 원생이 없습니다 should translate roughly as “there is no one enrolled in this class,” but all the dictionary searches say that 원생 means “abiogenesis” (which is to say, the spontaneous genesis of life from non-life).  Which would give a translation more in line of:  “there is no enrolled abiogenesis.”  Hmmm…  So, I deduce that 원생 means “student” or “child,” which some understanding of how chinese-rooted words work makes at least a little bit of sense (I know 생 has to do with kids), as it would give: “there is no enrolled child.”  But it’s frustrating the dictionary won’t cooperate.  And babelfish, in this instance, concurs:  “There is not an abiogenesis which is registered,” it says.  Hahahum.
And I saw a sign in a cafe earlier, it said, in part, “다 드신 후!”  After that, it said, roughly, “please return your trays to the first floor.”  That second part, I translated and understood, almost effortlessly.  But that initial alert was completely impenetrable to me.  I can’t make any meaning of it whatsoever.  The dictionary is not useful.  Babelfish provides:  “after holding all…” which makes a little bit of sense, but I can’t really contextualize that either.
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Caveat: 저는 위키백과 ♥

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Internet & Blogging / Language & Linguistics / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Which is to say, ”I♥Wikipedia” (roughly… seems to me, the heart should go at the end in Korean, since that’s the verb, right? And… what about endings? Should it end in “-♥요”? “-♥해요”?) What exactly does the heart stand for – the whole verb, including endings? Or just the semantic root. These are harder to resolve in Korean, than in English, maybe. Then again, basically, the heart works like Chinese.
Anyway, back to 위키백과 (wikipaekgwa = wiki encyclopedia i.e. wikipedia). There was an awesome review of it by Noam Cohen in the New York Times.

Caveat: 主體

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Life is a Dream / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I had this weird dream the other day, right as I was waking up. The dream had this unidentified guru-like person, who was advising me to practice “Juche” as a means to personal growth and salvation. He was pointing to a page with the Chinese characters for it (see title-line).
But then Ken interrupted (Ken is the archetype interrupter, in Jared’s dreamland), and I lost dream-traction… vaguely.
“Juche” (주체) is the Korean name for the official ideology of North Korea, as formulated by Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il.  It’s 2 parts Stalinism, 2 parts fascism, 1 part maoism, and 1 part feudalism.  Well, that’s my own take on it.
Kim’s folly.  Literally, it means something like “corism,” as in, “the ideology of core” or “ideology of the main subject.”  But generally it’s translated as “self-reliance,” as it is strongly autarkic in character.
Interestingly, when I looked in the naver.com dictionary, I discovered that 주체 can also mean “indigestion caused by drinking” and also “a burden.”  Nice bit of homonymy. Courtesy naver.com:
주체(主體) the subject;the main body;【중심】the core;the nucleus;『법』 the main constituent
주체(酒滯) indigestion from[caused by] drinking
주체 a burden;a bother;a handful ―하다 cope with[take care of] one´s burden
It was strange that it was the Chinese hanja that were in the dream, since North Korea no longer uses Chinese characters – their banning was, in fact, part of the culturally self-reliant practice of Juche, as it was developed in the 60’s in reaction to the Sino-Soviet split.
Speaking of weapons of mass destruction (we were speaking of weapons of mass destruction?), check out this “fake 404” from the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It made me laugh.
Other notes from studying Korean:
시(時) o´clock;time;hour (I recognized the hanja for this on a sign, recently.  It was a cool feeling.)

Caveat: Freaky Ergativity Fetish

Language & Linguistics / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

What's ergativity?  In the field of linguistics, ergativity is a way for languages' syntactical systems (i.e. grammars) to organize themselves.   It is one of several ways, and contrasts mostly with what might be termed accusativity.  Which is to say, there are ergative features of syntactic systems, and accusative features.   Most languages exhibit a strong leaning toward one system or the other, and to most Westerners, ergativity seems exotic because most European languages are markedly accusative.  One popular counter-example is Basque, which is broadly ergative.  But that's not exactly a widely-spoken European language. 

Ergativity is very hard to explain to people without a lot of background in comparing the grammars of different languages and linguistic features, but here's an effort at an example, drawn from English.

English is mostly accusative.  This means that the subjects of transitive and intransitive verbs are grammatically "the same," while the objects of transitive verbs are "different" from those subjects.   In grammar, in English, subjects come "in front" and objects come "behind."  For example:

The alligator dances the charleston.
The alligator dances.

The alligator, in both examples, is the subject, and, when the verb "dance" is intransitive (the second example), the subject, "The alligator" still shows up in front of the verb, showing it is a subject, not an object.  We cannot give an intransitive verb "only" an object, e.g.  neither of these below make sense (though for basically opposite reasons, one because of syntactic accusativity and one because of semantic accusativity):

*Dances the alligator.
*The charleston dances.

This is "normal" accusative behavior.  But English does have some special verbs, which are "ergative" in terms of how they work.  Consider this:

The alligator broke my pencil.
My pencil broke.

In this case, the "object" of the breaking in the intransitive usage of the verb "promotes" to the subject position, which is now not called the subject position but the ergative position, because in ergative systems, there's not a contrast between subject and object (nominative vs accusative) but rather a contrast between ergative and absolutive. 

I'm sure this seems really strange and hard to understand.  I didn't understand it at all in my intro to linguistics class, and didn't really figure it out until my second semester of syntax (for linguistic majors).  Actually, it's possible I still don't really have it figured out.

Anyway, why am I thinking about this?  I want to know, is Korean ergative?

I know Japanese is largely accusative.   And I'm guessing that Chinese is what's called "split ergative," meaning it can't decide if it's ergative or not.  But what's Korean?  My current guess is that, like along so many other linguistic parameters, it's some kind of outlier… its "own damn thing."   Korean strikes its own path through the linguistic wilderness.  That's part of what draws me to the language.

But what path is that?  Korean has noun case markers (just like, say, Finnish or Latin), but they are clitic (meaning they stand alone as word-particles, much as case markers do in Japanese).  But, unlike anywhere else I've experienced, these case markers can be "stacked."  Which is cool.  You can attach a locative case marker to a noun phrase, and then attach a topic case marker to that.  I saw one like that, earlier today.

In other words, you can make noun phrases play multiple syntactic roles in the sentence simultaneously.  Which is cool.  Worse, of course… all case marking of all sorts in Korean is entirely optional.  You show case when you feel like it.  Mostly, in higher registers and during careful speech, and in writing, of course.   But… with all these case particles floating around like so much syntactic dust, are things ergative or accustive?

 I'm going to investigate….

…그사이에 저는 떡볶이를 먹어요.

(=meanwhile+[DATIVE MARKER] I+[TOPIC MARKER] tteokbokki+[OBJECT MARKER] eat+[POLITENESS MARKER])

Caveat: Corned Beef Hash

Banalities & Journaling / Food & Drink / Life in Korea / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

My friend Basil showed me a curious little hole-in-the wall place only a block from where I live that serves American-style "brunch" on Sundays – eggs, hash browns, pancakes, bacon.  All those very American breakfast foods that are so bad for you, but so comforting, too.  "Denny's food," is how I always think of it.

For about 8 dollars (which is very expensive for low-end restaurant food, here), I got corned beef hash, french toast, eggs over easy, two cups of coffee.  It was a nice nostalgia trip, but, for health reasons, not good to make into a habit.  It's a good thing I'm not into going to restaurants alone – that place is too close to be entirely safe.  "LOL."  And… so much for incidental meat, eh?

Anyway, it was cool.  And then he and I spent some time trying to study our Korean.  He's not as far along as I am, which of course is good for my ego, because I get to be knowledgeable and erudite about it, which in fact I'm not.  But, exploiting relative differences, and all that. 

나는 콘비프 해시를 점심 먹었어요.   맛있었어요.  그래서, 지금 행복해요.  잘 지내세요… ^_^ 내일 보겠읍니다.

Caveat: Wobow! Thebey ubuse ubbi dubbi hebere!

Language & Linguistics / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Ubbi dubbi is a language game (or “language”) apparently popularized by the PBS TV program ZOOM. Which must be how I learned it – I remember practicing it with my friend Bob (or was it Mark or Ken?) on a number 6 Grand Ave bus in St Paul in the 1980’s, while fellow passengers looked on in bemusement.
Writing it down kind of loses the effect, mostly because of the unphonetic nature of English. Here is a video sample I found on youtube:

I also found an Ubbi Dubbi translator.
Well, I heard my students Amy and Sally using it with each other, the other day. In Korean! And this is actually documented… I found a brief reference to something called 도깨비말 (“ogre language”) in the English wikipedia article on language games.
What was so interesting and amazing to me about hearing it done in Korean is that, stunningly, I found the Korean easier to understand. I think it was because they have to slow down to do it, and it reduplicates the vowels, which are mostly fairly “pure” in Korean (unlike the messy diphthongs so common in English) which makes it easier to pick out which vowel is being used. How did it sound?  Hmm… very briefly, I heard Amy say, for example, 그브래배? (keubeuraebae <= keurae = “is that right?”).   Totally cool.

Caveat: Glish

Español Aleatorio (Random Spanish) / Language & Linguistics / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I was websurfing and found an interesting thing:  Ilan Stavans has translated the first chapter of Don Quixote into a very entertaining Spanglish version.  Here are the first few sentences:

In un placete de La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivía, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un grayhound para el chase. A cazuela with más beef than mutón, carne choppeada para la dinner, un omelet pa’ los Sábados, lentil pa’ los Viernes, y algún pigeon como delicacy especial pa’ los Domingos, consumían tres cuarers de su income. El resto lo employaba en una coat de broadcloth y en soketes de velvetín pa’ los holidays, with sus slippers pa’ combinar, while los otros días de la semana él cut a figura de los más finos cloths. Livin with él eran una housekeeper en sus forties, una sobrina not yet twenty y un ladino del field y la marketa que le saddleaba el caballo al gentleman y wieldeaba un hookete pa’ podear.

I've always been fascinated by the way that languages mix together.  I have been hyperaware, lately, of the immense amount of Konglish found in my current South Korean environment.  I spend a lot of time reading random signs, websites, and bits of advertising, just to practice, and when I do that, I am stunned by how much of it turns out simply to be English written in Korean hangul.  Some examples from just the other day on the MSN homepage, Korean version:

스페셜 이벤트 = seupesyeul ibenteu (i.e. special event)
스타홀릭 = seutahollik (star-holic i.e. "addicted to celebrities," roughly)

As a language learner, I find all this easy-to-parse verbiage reassuring.  As a student of linguistics more generally, as I already mentioned, I find it fascinating.  But as a sometime critic of neocolonial processes, I sometimes find myself disturbed about it, too.

Anyway, I'm going to try to coin yet another neologism.  "Glish" is the generic name for all the hybrids the globalized neo-colonial enterprise called America is engendering:  Spanglish, Konglish, Franglais, etc. 

Caveat: 악플 isn’t in the dictionary

한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

What does 악플 mean? “악플” (akpeul) is a slang term I learned today, that means, roughly, the negative comments or “flames” that people write on internet sites. I think it’s cool that Korean has a special slang word for this. Not sure it’s particularly useful knowledge. But I’m always especially happy to learn words that can’t be found in any dictionary.

Caveat: 김家네에서 점심 밥 먹었어요

Banalities & Journaling / Food & Drink / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Last night a bunch of people from work went out to a Chinese restaurant in the “meat market” which is local foreigner-slang for the west end of the La Festa shopping center (which my apartment building is directly adjacent to).  I don’t know how the area got that name — whether because of the large number of restaurants, the existence of place(s) specifically selling meat (which I haven’t seen as something salient), or because of the nightclub scene (which as you know I tend to avoid).  Anyway, there are some good restaurants there, and the Chinese place is a regular haunt for semi-official LBridge staff outings.  Note that “Chinese” is interpreted broadly:  just as getting “Chinese” in America is hardly the same as getting food in China, I rather doubt there’s more than a passing similarity between China’s authentic cuisines and what they call “Chinese” in Korea.  But it’s pretty good.
Today, after the unhealthy food last night, I was craving kimchi bokkeumbap. I ordered some delivered from 김家네 (Kim Family’s House), the convenient take-out and delivery place on the corner. Having lunch delivered to the staff room at LBridge is nearly universal, but I tend not to do it except rarely, as the portions are always larger than I should eat regularly. There are lots of places that deliver, but 김家네 is the most popular – I think it’s part of a chain of Korean fast food joints.
It took me a long time to figure out the middle syllable (Kim-ga-ne) because on all the written material associated with the restaurant, they use the Chinese hanja to stand for the “ga.” In pure hangeul, it would be 김가네.  I don’t know why they use the hanja – it’s a strictly stylistic thing, but I never knew how it was pronounced as I have never managed to develop the skill required to search for Chinese hanja in dictionaries without already knowing the pronunciation.  I had to wait to overhear some coworkers talking about it to make the connection with the bags and containers I saw from the place.  “Kim-ga” means, roughly, Kim Family, and the -ne suffix means something akin to the way “chez” works in French, for example.

Caveat: 배달시도했으나 미배달

Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

pictureI sent a package to my sister (and nephews – see picture at right) for xmas.
When I send a package using Korea Post’s overseas expedited mail service, I get little text messages on my cellphone telling me about the package’s progress. Well, I didn’t realize when I sent the package that my sister wasn’t in town over xmas. So, they are unable to get a signature for the package I sent. The message sent to me was “배달시도했으나 미배달, 수취인 수령대기.” See? Isn’t it obvious that they are tried but were unable to deliver the package, and are awaiting someone to receive it? Well, maybe not obvious… it took me a few minutes with a dictionary to work it out. The crucial part is “미배달” (mi-bae-dal = [UN]-deliver-[FUTURE PARTICIPLE]).
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Caveat: 도둑고양이 및 컵라면

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I think watching old Korean TV dramedies is good for me.  It helps me build my confidence with Korean – if not actually doing much to improve my proficiency, probably.  I learn to recognize little bits of conversational Korean, and pick up intriguing bits of vocabulary.  Plus, they’re mindlessly entertaining and occasionally quite funny, and provide good cultural insights too, keeping me positively engaged in the culture, in a way that working at hellbridge certainly fails me.
They’re probably a better way to kill time than to sit around feeling gloomy or depressed about my work, due to how overwhelming it feels.  Or beating myself up over not actually spending time studying Korean intensively with all those Korean textbooks I’ve bought.
Anyway, the series I’m watching right now (옥탑방 고양이= oktappang goyangi =”Rooftop-room Cat”) is nothing spectacular.  I downloaded it originally based strictly on the cute name – I like cats and I like the Korean word for cat (고양이, besides which I live in the near-homonymous city 고양).
So I went off looking for the script because there was a word I wanted to figure out, and learned that the lead actress is one of the seemingly many Korean pop-culture types that have committed suicide in the last several years.  There seems to be an epidemic of it, at least based on how people talk about it.  It’s kind of sad.
On the website about the series, I saw the following notice:  “故 정다빈양의 명복을 빕니다.”  It was strikingly somber, in black and white, unlike the garish colors normally employed on Korean websites.  And it had a hanja (故).  Hanja is the use of Chinese characters in Korean writing, which is quite rare except in higher-register news articles, and it clearly wasn’t a name, since it was directly followed by the name of the actress (정다빈).  That made me think, too, that the content was more “formal” than is normally found on Korean entertainment websites.  So I intuited it’s meaning, and went off a-googling.
And sure enough, imdb told me she had committed suicide.  The language of the notice is roughly, “lamented Jeong Da Bin -[some kind of ending, genitive?] pray for the repose of the deceased (i.e. RIP).”
I never found the script.  MBC (the network that made the series) doesn’t make the scripts easy to find, at least for someone with limited Korean language proficiency like myself.  That’s why I like KBC shows better — their website makes it easy to see the scripts of the old shows.  But I figured out the phrase I was wondering about, anyway, by playing it over a few times and typing what I heard into naver’s online dictionary:  도둑고양이= dodukgoyangi =”burglar-cat” i.e. stray cat.
The other thing that I caught was the term 컵라면(= keopramyeon =”Cup Ramen”). Instant ramen noodles in little cups (just add hot water) are endemic, here.  And there’s nothing novel about the term.  What I noticed for the first time was the pronunciation of the term in rapid speech.  Despite being a hybrid of English (컵 keop cup) and Japanese (라면 ramyeon ramen) borrowings, it still undergoes the very native allophonic convergence at the intersection of the first and second syllables, so that it is pronounced not /keop-ra-myeon/ but rather /keom-na-myeon/.  The terminal /p/ and inital /r/ shift to nasal versions, but retain their points of articulation.  It’s entirely regular in Korean, but as can be seen, it makes recognizing borrowings from other languages a bit difficult in spoken form.  Now, there’s a sort of coolness only a truly geeky linguist-type could appreciate.
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Caveat: 있어. 없어.

Kids / The Wonders of Work / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I overheard two of my students arguing, today.
“있어.”
“없어.”
“있어.”
“없어.”
“있어!”
“없어!”
“있어어어!”
“없어어어!”
I was pleased to understand flawlessley what they were saying, although I had no clue what they were arguing about:  “There is.”  “There isn’t.”  “There is!”  “There isn’t!”

Caveat: 미국무부, “북한은 긴장 높이는 행동 중단해야”

Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Headline-du-jour: US State Dept, “N. Korea-TOPIC tension high-TOPIC [again?] behavior interrupt-do-OBLIGATION… [and then what?]”.  Not sure quite how to parse this, in detailed terms.  But the idea seems relatively clear, given current events.  I didn’t realize -야 (=[grammatically subordinate obligation]) could terminate a non-subordinate clause, however.   Or that there could be two TOPIC markers in the same clause, for that matter.   Perhaps it’s some journalistic shorthand?  Or perhaps since it’s the rather incoherent US State Department, being quoted?

Caveat: (마음이 아파요)

Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

well, this weekend i haven’t been feeling well.  and plunged into a rather dark depression.  i know what it’s about–the whole work thing, y’know?   the feeling that i made a bad decision, signing the contract.  overwhelmed with the hours.  angry about various things, and not able to manage that anger properly.
it makes me mad that one of the reasons i wanted to stay in korea was so i could keep building on my korean language skill… but ive been so overwhelmed with work and the hours grading papers, that since the start of september i’ve devoted exactly one hour to study.  i feel too exhausted most of the time to push on it, although in august and especially before that, in july, i felt like i was finally making some amazing forward progress.
i’m really not sure what to do.  i’ll just wait this demon out, and hopefully things will smooth out at work a bit.

Caveat: Hint of Autumn

Banalities & Journaling / My Photos / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I had to go to a special office of KTF (my cellphone provider) because they wanted to cancel my service because their records showed I was no longer a legal alien – I had to prove my visa and residency permit had been renewed. It was all very bureaucratic. I was mostly unable to communicate with the various people I dealt with, yet I succeeded in conveying the issue through a combination of showing them paperwork, gesturing at various spots on the paperwork, and isolated phrases in Korean in the style of:  문제를 있습니다 (problem [I] have-FORMAL).
The office was near the 백석역, and after my hour of patient waiting and courteous nodding, I could’ve taken the subway back home, or even a taxi – it’s only 3 bucks for that distance, typically. Nevertheless, I decided I needed some exercise, so I walked back home instead. It was very sunny, and because today was the day after a major holiday, there was still a festive mood in the air and a lot of people had the day off and were doing things like shopping or lazing around socializing in sidewalk settings.
I saw a tiny hint of autumn, in the bushy bit of yellow embedded amid the latesummery green of the trees. You can make it out in the exact center of the photo I took with my now once again contractually functioning cellphone.
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Caveat: Speaking of Mad Cows…

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / My Photos / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

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I saw this sign on the road between Ravenshoe and Atherton, in Queensland, Australia. That’s the sort of cow you need to beware of.
-Notes for Korean-
지금 나는 단지 우정을 찾아요.  now I only friendship seek.
아빠보다 엄마가 단순해=mom is simpler than dad (easier to
understand or get along with, I guess)
단순=simple
단순해=is simple
-보다=more than
일하고 있어요=I’m working (progressive)
재치=wit, cleverness, tact
똑똑=drops, dripping
진실=truthfulness
따뜻하다=mild, genial, warm
한국말을 연습하고 싶어요=I want to practice Korean language
편안하다=peaceful, tranquil
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Caveat: A View

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / My Photos / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Hmm.  Why am I so exhausted, these last few days? Maybe an aftereffect of my travels to Australia and HongKong.  Anyway… not much to write about.  Work is demanding a lot of hours, as I knew it would upon getting back.  Nothing unexpected or unpleasant, just a lot to be done.
I took this picture on the Kuranda road (Kennedy Highway) on a turnout driving down from Mareeba to Cairns last Friday.
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-Notes for Korean-
기분이 어때요?=how’re you feeling?
그것 때문에 똥쌌다=”I had a hard time of it” (very vulgar, literally “because of that I took a shit”)
지루해요=it’s tedious / I’m bored
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Caveat: Ockers?

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / My Photos / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

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My flight to Cairns was diverted by a Typhoon, so instead of changing planes in Hong Kong I switched in Brisbane instead.  I picked up my rental car in Cairns at around noon instead of the scheduled 8 am.  I was rather tired, but I managed the drive up the hill (via the Kennedy Highway through Kuranda, Mareeba and Atherton and, after getting lost on the road leading to my mother’s house, I arrived at 3 pm or so.
I realized that if I’d driven the same amount of time at the same speeds in South Korea, I’d have nearly crossed the country, diagonally. Australia is a huge country, and very sparsely populated.  I have been in a strange sort of culture shock since I got here – much stronger than during my previous two visits to Australia.  I think it has to do with having come here after living a full year in Korea – my previous visits had been coming from the U.S., which really isn’t that culturally different from Australia, when you get right down to it.
For one thing, both countries have lots of ockers.  But in the U.S., we call them rednecks, I think.  Or some word like that… I’m not sure that’s the right translation. “Ocker” is an Australianism, and means a boorish and annoying person, from what I’ve gathered. My mother used the term to complain about the idiotic patrons in a store she’d been in, I think. I like the word, anyway. Maybe I can find an excuse to teach it to my students.
In the first picture, you see a wallaby. They congregate at the top of the hill above my mother’s house, where the driveway starts at the dead end of the road. In the second picture is a friend of my mother’s named George, a female kookabura, who often comes to visit seeking handouts and snacks.
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-Notes for Korean-
외국에서 살기가 재므있을 것 같다.
=”seems like it’d be fun to live abroad”
잘 하기는요=”Ha, I do it well?  Not really.” (very idiomatic translation)
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Caveat: 스페인 여객기 추락 153명 사망

Banalities & Journaling / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I had another tiny yet triumphal linguistic milestone this morning when I logged onto the internet. I opened up google news, which, because of my IP address, plops me down on the Korean version of the site by default. Normally, the only time I spend time on google news in Korean is if I’m intentionally and masochistically spending time there trying to decipher a headline or maybe (if I’m feeling ambitious) the first line of an article.
But today, I had the experience of a headline grabbing my attention and leading me to click through to the article. It said: “스페인 여객기 추락 153명 사망…19명만 생존.” It helped that there were a few keywords in the article that I easily knew: 스페인=(Spain), 명=(PEOPLE COUNTER), 사망=(dead). So it was about 153 people dead in Spain. More terrorism? I, the reading public, had to know more!
Of course, I went to google news in English, finally, to satisfy my curiosity. But it was cool to have the experience of “spontaneous reading” (as opposed to deliberate reading, I guess). Still, reading about airline crashes, whether in Korean or English, isn’t necessarily smart, right before an airplane trip.
And now, a completely unrelated thought. There’s been a lot in the news lately about McCain closing his gap with Obama in polls on the presidential race, and much commentary about how they’re “neck and neck,” or somesuch.
But Obama is still at 60 points to McCain’s 40, if you look at Intrade.  Intrade is a “prediction market”–a place where people bet real money on the outcomes of future events–and a large number of studies have shown that prediction markets are phenomenally more accurate than polls at predicitons.  So I’ll just keep watching Intrade and keep ignoring the polls–I will be surprised if that historical accuracy doesn’t again prove out.

Caveat: 드르르

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / My Photos / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

My current favorite Korean word is 드르르 (government romanization deureureu, IPA /tɯɾɯɾɯ/). Although I’m not quite sure how to use it smoothly. Er… that’s what it means: “smoothly, swimmingly.” Something like that.  I love the sound of it. The way it sounds like you’re beginning to hum some great musical trope or something. Duh-ruh-ruh.

I went to KINTEX this morning. KINTEX is a giant convention center, but every Wednesday the Uijeongbu area Immigration office (which handles the northern half of Gyeonggi province) sets up a help desk for all the foreigners in the Ilsan area, so they don’t have to trek to Uijeongbu to get their paperwork dealt with (40 minutes in on one subway line, then 40 minutes out on another is the most plausible way to make the trip, I would guess).
I got the reentry visa and paperwork worked out for my trip to Australia next week (leaving this Saturday). The matter went smoothly. There:  드르르 진행되었어요. I used it!

That date has crept up very fast. Of course, with my last-minute negotiations over the contract renewal and all, I actually only bought the tickets last week.  So not that fast, really.  It’s ending up being a last-minute thing all around.

I took the taxi to KINTEX–it’s less than 3 bucks, so no big deal. Then I decided to walk home. The sky was deep cerulean. The weather’s been hot, still, but much less humid, and so there’s not much haze in the air, especially with a nice morning breeze blowing.  There were huge puffy lumps of cobalt and chalk cruising the skies randomly, looking for something to rain on. I zig-zagged through the narrow grid of the kburbs somewhat aimlessly, knowing my general direction.

I felt extremely aware for once of what a huge metropolis I’m living in – I’m on the northwestern corner of one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world, by population. I could travel east, south, or southeast for over an hour and still be in neighborhoods identical except in specifics. West and north are different – 15 minutes west is the estuary of the Han River, and beyond that some islands and the Yellow sea and China. 20 minutes north is the most militarized border in the world, and a socialist workers’ paradise, I think.

Here is a picture of a lovely ivy-covered kburban home.
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Caveat: The End of “Spring”

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I finished watching 달자의봄 (Dal-ja’s Spring). So far, this is the Korean drama I’ve liked most of all the ones I’ve tried watching–as I mentioned before, it’s edgier, by far, than any of the others, despite its sappy, romantic core plot elements.
My favorite character in the drama is 강신자 (Kang Shin-ja, played by actress 양희경=Yang Hui-gyeong – see the picture). Part of why I like this character (and/or the actress who plays her) is because she speaks a very clearly enunciated, slow, methodical Korean, which is easier to understand than most that I hear on tv shows. Whether this methodical Korean is part of the character, or inherent to the actress’s personality, I’m not sure. Regardless, I enjoy listening to her clipped, slow syllables.
pictureThe character herself is kind of intriguing, too: a hyperbole of Korean stereotypes about the middle-aged female middle-manager. She’s quite hilarious, without ever being silly or undignified. And in the end, you realize she’s a very sympathetic character, too. I wish they’d made more of the fact that she turns out to be the male lead’s aunt, but she kind of drops out of the last episodes.
If you want to see her in action, she figures prominently in part of episode 11, which someone has been kind enough to upload to youtube (with Spanish subtitles!). [UPDATE 20200327: link was rotten. Here is a different short link from episode 12.] Check her out – she’s the rotund woman in the red suit. Listen to how she minces out those Korean syllables… fabulous!
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Caveat: Analytic comforts

Banalities & Journaling / Teaching & Methodology / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I don't have much to say at the moment.  But I've been putting together some ruminations on language learning. Here's a recent draft.  I was thinking of making it into a standalone webpage somewhere, after some more editing and content, for my students to see.

Jared's thoughts on how to actually learn to SPEAK effectively.  Or, rather… "a list of some things that don't really help you speak better."

  • Memorizing vocabulary doesn't really help.  Lists of words with definitions or translation-meanings have a place, especially starting out, but farther on, learning and memorizing lists of words with meanings, in this way, will not ever help you improve fluency. 
  • Knowing grammar won't make you speak better.  It helps to understand the ways that the grammar of the language work, but studying it and memorizing "right" vs "wrong" grammar cannot improve your fluency.
  • If you can't understand what you hear, you won't get better at speaking. Listening is critical. It's better to study listening by hearing real conversations, dialogues on television, etc., instead of just listening to things from textbooks, which are made-up conversations that are not real.  And it's better to be able to answer simple questions about what you hear than to just memorize the content of the dialogues, too.  Answering simple questions well (automatically!) is more help than answering complicated questions slowly or uncertainly.
  • Good reading or writing skills don't guarantee you will be a good speaker. Spoken English is a different language that written English – really!  The spoken version of any language is very different from its written version.

As anyone who looks at my little "notes for Korean" will no doubt realize, I'm not very good at following my own advice.  There's a comfort and safety in pursuing language-learning analytically, that makes it very difficult to abandon such efforts despite their ineffectiveness.

-Notes for Korean-
소식=light fare, plain meal
소식=news, information
새롭다=new, fresh, recent

Basic adverb-derivational endings
-이=for most "old" or native-korean verbs
-리=for descriptive irregular verbs in -르 (this is just a systematic extension of the -ㄹ- doubling irregularity)
-히=for sino-korean verbs in -하다 (this is a highly productive and large class)
I had an epiphany as I figured this out:  most -하다 verbs are sino-korean, and the whole process is about accommodating the complex morphology of korean, when borrowing from other languages – it happens with english loanwords that become verbs, too!

곱다=beautiful, lovely, fair
-부터=from, since

Caveat: Hero of Dust

Banalities & Journaling / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I awoke from a strange, somewhat unhappy dream this morning, but the details quickly fled.  Something about being left in charge of a large, gloomy place, with insufficient knowledge or support to know what to do.  Like a cross between a poorly maintained data center (a la my last job at HealthSmart) and a musty old used bookstore, with shades of an automotive junkyard thrown in.  And there was this wind blowing, and then some hero-type-person showed up, but he was made of dust, and was all bluster and no depth.

I ate a delicious nectarine as part of breakfast, and drank my iced coffees, and checked my emails.  Not many emails, these days, except spam and direct marketing from Mr Obama's campaign and suchlike.  I've mostly convinced myself that renewing with LBridge is the most stable, logical choice, the "path of least resistance," but I find myself groping for excuses to be angry with them and to avoid renewing.  So it's clear I have some discomfort with the idea.  The question is, is my discomfort with renewing greater than the prospective discomfort that will come with the multiple uncertainties about "what's next" that would accompany not renewing?  I seem to be craving stability, lately, more than is my wont.

-Notes for Korean-
대결=contest, confrontation
매력=attractiveness, glamor
펼쳤다=unfolded, spread out, opened
종이=paper

정말… 괜찮은겁니까?="Are you really alright?"
There's a wacky infix -ㄴ거- that I can't figure out, though my guess is that it's related to the normally non-terminal -ㄴ걸, meaning "the action or state expressed by the verb occurs or is the way it is despite and contrary to whatever expectations what might normally have" (awkward phrasing courtesy my grammar book, p 225).  The book also says "this pattern can attach '요' to express politeness," which leads me to think that in the above case, -ㅂ니다 is being attached to express higher formality, and that this is causing the -ㄹ to be dropped.  But I'm not terribly confident about this.

힘들어="I'm tired" (it's arduous [?])

Caveat: The Obsolete Code of the Higher Eclectica

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / Life in Korea / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I was reading an editorial in the New York Times that, although clearly intended as satire and meant tongue-in-cheek, struck me as fundamentally accurate. And it made me feel outmoded, given the extent to which I buy into the "code of the Higher Eclectica" as Mr Brooks put it. I feel a certain scorn, combined with a distrust, of those who base their definitions of cultural coolness on media over underlying culture. But I think it's true. It's now the iPhone generation, and cultural content has become moot – all that matters is means of transmission. 

I begin to imagine a marxian-style analysis that encompasses historically and materially determined transitions in "modes of transmission" that goes above-and-beyond the classically marxist transitions in "modes of production."  Let's just call it the germ of an idea, for now.  Mientras tanto, digamos adios a la "Higher Eclectica" del Sr Brooks.

Which reminds me of a couple of lines in the latest Korean drama that I've been watching episodes of:  they mention the "386" generation as being those people in their 30's and early 40's (in Korea, but it applies just as well to U.S. culture I think)–people who's formative years included personal computers but for whom the internet and broadband cellphone connectivity seem just a tad "newfangled."

Anyway, the drama is called 달자의 봄 (Dalja's Spring), and it is consistently violating all the "rules of Korean drama" that I'd decided must exist up until now.  It deals with all kinds of unexpected and "taboo" subjects that every single drama I've watched up until now scrupulously avoided:  divorce, suicide, abortion, premarital sex, pregnancy outside of marriage, middle-aged career women, single mothers, irresponsible fathers.  And more than just blinkingly, although by U.S. standards it remains utterly G-rated.

Yet despite all that, it is a very light-hearted, even sappy romance, with a fundamentally conservative social message, just like all the Korean dramas I've watched.  This message strikes me as both compelling and unrealistic vis-a-vis human day-to-day realities in any culture.  And it continues to reinforce my earlier not-so-clearly-stated hypothesis that contemporary Korean culture (and perhaps East Asian culture more generally?) is undergoing a kind of Confucian counter-reformation within a modernist and/or post-modernist trajectory.

Yesterday I worked–I'd "volunteered" to help with a speech contest, and so I woke up early and went over to ElBeuRitJi's Baengma Campus, and served as a judge for lots of not-bad student speeches.  It was awesome to see some of my former RingGuAPoReom students (middle schoolers) who were participating, and one of my former students, shy-but-supremely-competent Irene, even managed to win a runner-up prize, which was quite an accomplishment in the context of ElBeuRitJi's much more intense academic standards, as well as a remarkable conquest of her own reticence.   I felt parentally proud, as teachers sometimes do, I suppose–Irene is one of the few students who I remember vividly from my first few days of teaching back last September, when I realized quickly that she was the quiet one feeding all the right answers to her loud and gregarious friend, Amy, who was sitting next to her. 

After work, I walked home in the steaming heat of mid afternoon, all the way down past Madu-yeok and Jeongbalsan, and when I got back to my apartment I felt terrible.  Tired and sickly.  Perhaps I had given myself mild heat stroke or something, I don't know.  But I basically passed out, feeling exhausted, and had an unpleasant night of restless sleep.

-Notes for Korean-
context:  달자의 봄
쿨하게 나가야지="act cool" (kulhage nagayaji = cool-DO-ADVERBIAL go-out-SOME-IMPERATIVE-VERB-ENDING-THAT-I-CAN'T-FIND-IN-A-BOOK)
note that 쿨 (kul) is apparently directly from English

지금 뭔가 야한 상상 하고 있었구만, 맞지?
"Now you're having some vulgar fantasy, right?"
야한=dirty, coarse, vulgar
상상=imagination

일어나다=to get up, wake up
so… 일어났어요?="you're up now?"

context: obsessing on unparseable Korean
According to the drama transcript on the KBS website, in episode 18, about 47 minutes in, grandma says:
고저 한번 잘해볼라다가 끝나는거 고거이 인생이라구 말이디.
I had tremendous difficulty trying to parse this, and I have failed.  Also, as I listened to it over and over, I don't think that's what she actually says.  The last words sound more like … 인생이라고 말이야, which, conveniently, I find slightly easier to parse–so I'm going to assume, with great hubris, that there's an error in the Korean written transcript, or else the transcript is meant to reflect some kind of dialectical variation and that the actress playing grandma chooses not to implement when she actually speaks.  Certainly, I've never heard of a verb ending -디 before.  Anyway… according to the subtitlers, the phrase is supposed to mean:  "The true meaning of life is to live well once through."  So, you can see why that caught my interest–a nice philosophical, aphoristic nugget.  But I really have been utterly unable to parse this successfully.
With my revisions to the transcript, the transliteration would be:
goseo hanbeon jalhaebolladaga kkeutnaneungeo gogeoi insaengirago maliya
=fluctuation once well-do-try-[INTRO-WARNING?(p231 in my grammar)]-[INTERRUPTED-PAST(but can this ending attach to the previous one?)] end-GERUND-[MYSTERY-ENDING-#1] [MYSTERY-WORD-#2] life-[COPULA]-[AUX VERB -고 말다?=finish up?]
words…
고저=fluctuation
한번=once<=한=one (ADJ form)+번=time (COUNTER)
끝나다=end, come to an end
고거이=?that?
인생=human life

Caveat: Life in Sunshine Heights

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

The news from Lone Mountain, Sunshine Heights, Near-the-Capital, Korea. 

Place names in Korean are often revealed to be rather inane once you figure out what they mean.  I became curious about some of the terminology in my address, and investigated a little bit.  I live in a district called Ilsan, which means nothing more than "one mountain."  Technically, there are two districts:  Ilsanseo-gu and Ilsandong-gu (West One Mountain District and East One Mountain District) – so I guess that means the two districts have to share the one mountain.  Nor is it clear to me which of various mountains in the neighborhood is the "one." 

These districts (also called "wards" and, in my opinion, best translated as "boroughs") form part of Goyang City.  Goyang seems to mean something like "sunshine elevation" – so you might call it Sunshine Heights City. It's also an exact homonym for "exaltation" and a near-homonym for "cat" (goyangi).

The city of Goyang is part of Gyeonggi province. Gyeong is just the Chinese hanja for "capital" (as in capital city), and is often a word used to refer to things related to the capital of the country, Seoul, which is just down the subway line. The -gi ending seems to refer to the fact that the province is "near-the-capital," which is self-evident if you look at a map.

Interestingly, the name Seoul is just the native Korean word for "gyeong" and means nothing more than "capital," too. In fact, you can use the word seoul to refer to the capital of other countries:  e.g. 프랑스의 서울 파리 (peurangseu-ui seoul pari = France's capital, Paris). 

-More Notes for Korean-
context:  work preparations and random thoughts
소금=salt
성적=record, score
회원=member
중=middle, during
대비=preparation, provision
고사=test
기말=end of term
문제=question(for discussion)
나무조각=wooden sculpture
지긋지긋 하군요="it's revolting"<=지긋지긋 하다=be tiresome, be disgusting, be abominable, etc.

Caveat: 과연 외로움은 상처보다 견디기 쉬운것일까?

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / My Photos / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

Yesterday, with my extra day off, I met Basil in Gangnam and ate some delicious very authentic-tasting tacos al pastor – they could’ve come from a street vendor in Mexico City. I felt happy.
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Today was more melancholy. Time is running out on my never-ending vacilation/procrastination regarding my decision to stay with ElBeuRitJi or not. I hate the fact of having to make decisions like this. If you just read my blog entries, you will conclude that I’m not very fond of ElBeuRitJi. And that’s true. But there are factors that encourage me, nevertheless, to want to renew. The primary one being that I’m craving some stability and/or predictability at the moment, and I am finally feeling somewhat pleased with the progress I’m making on my efforts to learn some Korean, so to throw things up in the air to see where the land, just now, feels like “running away without a good reason.”
Anyway, nobody will want to read too much about my angst. Let’s just say, by the end of the week, I’ll know for sure if I will be staying with ElBeuRitJi for another year or if everything will be up in the air come end-of-August, with who-knows-what coming next.
In other news… “Go-Stop” is a ubiquitous card game Koreans seem obsessed with–scenes involving people playing this game appear everywhere in movies and dramas on television.  I am trying to learn more about it. Rules:  https://www.pagat.com/fishing/gostop.html
-Notes for Korean-
context:  random notes
매일=everyday, daily
메일=email
날=day
괴물=monster
어린이=child
싫어=”Nope” or “I won’t do it” (a bit rude I think)<=싫다=to be disagreeable, to be unwilling, to be unpleasant
-보다=[comparative particle ending] “…than…”
-네=”and family” after a name, e.g. 달자네=Dalja and family
context:  reading a transcript alongside a tv drama
과연 외로움은 상처보다 견디기 쉬운것일까?
=indeed loneliness-TOPIC injury-than bear-GERUND easy-thing-COPULA-CONJECTURE
=”can it be that loneliness is easier to bear than pain?”
context:  a web advertisement for a game
재미없으면 보상해드립니다!=”if you are not amused, you get a refund!”
I’ve decided to add this to my blog’s tagline, for a while.  The breakdown:
보상=reward, compensation, recompense, refund(?)
드리다=[DONATORY auxiliary verb, HONORIFIC BENEFICIARY]=give, let, set, make a present of something to someone… preceded by V+어/아/여
cf. 주다=[DONATORY auxiliary verb, HUMILIFIC BENEFICIARY]… also preceded by V+어/아/여, which we use all the time to make requests…
… these are a case of a HONORIFIC/HUMILIFIC lexical pair, I think.
Just below, in the ad:
그걸과!=…I have no clue what this means, exactly; 그거-(<=그것) can be “that, this,” but what’s that embedded -ㄹ-?  an OBJ ending?  과=and, with, against; but that means the phrase has no verb… is that OK?  it would mean something like “against that!”  doesn’t sound quite right…
context:  reading the labels of household products
곰팡이=mold, mildew
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Caveat: It takes a million years for people to meet

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

I watched two movies.
The first was 時をかける少女(toki o kakeru shoujo, The girl who traveled through time), a Japanese film from 1983 about a girl who starts spontaneously hopping back and forth through time – as the title suggests.  It’s a rather stark, haunting work, but beautifully filmed and with memorable actors in the key roles, and a silly 1980’s JPop music video at the end, almost completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the film.
It’s interesting listening to Japanese after all my hard work in Korean – as I’ve read many times, knowing some Korean seems to make Japanese more “accessible,” even though my passive Japanase vocabulary is probably limited to at most 30 or so words and phrases (and my active vocab includes 2-3 fixed phrases, no more).  This weird accessibility comes about despite the fact that Japanese and Korean actually seem share very little mutually comprehensible vocabulary.  I think it must have to do with the similarities in grammar, word order, and pragmatics (i.e. how the language is deployed conversationally). One line in that movie that I liked: “It takes millions of years for people to meet,” from a recurring song sung by the character Fukushima.
pictureThe other movie was a bit of decadance. Or regression. A movie may qualify as being only great in its transcendent badness: Flash Gordon, Saviour of the Universe. This is the 1980 remake of the original 1930s series, and is one of those movies that was so bad it has since been elevated to high camp. But, with its Queen soundtrack and retro special effects, I have harbored an inordinate fondness for it, and it’s been so long since I’ve seen it. It came up in conversation with Basil yesterday, and last night I found it on a torrent and downloaded it. It was awesome. One memorable line, of many: “Are your men on the right pills?!” says Emperor Ming to his creepy number two, Clytus.
-Notes for Korean-
context:  here and there… going through some old scraps of paper I wrote things down on
싸려 = 아닥 = shut up
곤란 difficulty, suffering, distress, hardship (and with ―하다 )
당황 confusion, consternation (and with ―하다 )
방언 dialect, slang
재촉하다 press, urge, request, command
서두르다 hurry up, get a move on,
website says:  깝치다 = 서두르다
꼭 tightly, securely
깝치다 = to put on airs
달팽이=snail
기다릴게요=[I] will wait for [you]
진짜 스님 될려고 그러세요?=(really monk become-INTENTIVE is-true-DEFERENTIAL-POLITE)=”do you really want to become a monk?”
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