#27. 죽빵 -- Punch them in the face

I love comic books. These are great to wind down a busy day with, because you don't have to do a lot of work to enjoy them. No need to imagine the scenes in my head, because they're already drawn in. And there is something inherently funny about the onomatopoeia that get used in comic books. I would never say "KAPOW" or "BLAM" or "ZAP" in real life, but I kind of wish that everyone would start using these words more often, because these words are...

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#26. 궁예질 -- Mind-reading

Here's a question that is perhaps a bit cliché, but fascinating nonetheless: let's say that you're the king of a nation. Unfortunately, as things go for most kings, there are a few people that you're not so fond of, and you'd like to get rid of them. How would you go about accomplishing such a task? One Korean man was so bizarre in his ways in trying to achieve this goal, that it ultimately led him to the internet fame of Korea. You may remember...

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#25. 포돌이 -- This wonderful Korean character has no parallel

Once upon a time, the Koreans got tired of the negative public image of the Korean police force. In order to ensure that the Koreans could perceive the police force as friendly and approachable, the Korean police force decided to re-brand themselves by creating a mascot. Below is the culmination of their efforts. This adorable character's name is 포돌이 (the letter "포" comes from "police," and "돌이" is a suffix to describe an affectionate male...

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#24. 팩트폭행 -- The truth hurts

Believe it or not, according to the reports of the Korean internet users, the following conversation is said to have taken place in a Korean school during a history class. Student: It really is too bad that polygamy is no longer a thing. Teacher: Actually, you should be grateful that polygamy is no longer accepted. Student: ??? Teacher: If we still practiced polygamy, you would never be able to marry because people like 송중기 will have 100 wives...

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Listening exercise with transcript #4: What does he like about you?

Here is a short video clip. Without giving anything away, try to listen and see how much you can understand. The transcript is provided below. You may want to turn off the English subtitles. It is remarkably free of slang, and the informality of the dialogue is very much the kind of conversation that you could have with your close friends, so it might be worth it to practice! 진짜 싫다. 사람들이 알아? 너 평소에 이러고 사는거. 옷을 입었다가 더러워서 빨래통에 넣었다가 결국 입을게 없어서 그걸 다시 꺼내서 입고 심지어 그걸 밖에서도 아무렇지 않게 입고 돌아다니는거, 그사람은 혹시 아나해서. (이래봬도 쓸만해!) 너는 손이 많이가. 나정도 되니까 이런말도 해주는건데,...

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#23. 넘사벽 -- Try as you might

Superstitious people are everywhere. In North America, 13 is considered unlucky (I'm not really sure why; maybe because there were 13 people at the table during the last supper) and you sometimes see the 13th floor missing entirely from high-rise buildings. In Korea, the number to avoid (along with 13, because why not) is four. This is because the number four, pronounced "사" in Korean, sounds exactly like the Chinese character 死 meaning death (for...

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#22. 만렙 -- You're the best

I was an elementary school student in Korea in the late 90s and early 2000s, when Starcraft was just gaining its popularity. I was never a teen in Korea, and I was more interested in comic books and cute K-pop boy bands, so I never played Starcraft. Despite this, I heard about Starcraft daily from my classmates. If we were to form groups for some projects, our group name was invariably going to be Protoss or Terran, or some variation thereof (apparently, Zergs were too ugly to be considered a good name!) I listened to my classmates brag about their...

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#21. 한강물 차냐? -- Should I just go kill myself? (just kidding)

While I was fooling around on DC Inside (it's the Korean version of Reddit, but the people are the most vicious and mean, hence it is often my website of choice!), I read a pretty sad post of one of the users, where he really messed up his chance with the girl of his dreams. He misread signals, he was too eager, and it was a disaster overall. Everyone was mocking his failure, and in his depressed state, yet clearly being a good sport and playing...

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#20. 안드로메다 -- What is this, I don't even

So, I'm in the process of experimenting with my blog's layout. I'm not convinced that what I have now is better than what I had before, but it turns out that HTML is difficult to learn, and no template perfectly fits my dream. I'm going to continue to experiment for the next while, so if my blog is out of order, please visit again in a few minutes! Also soliciting any kind of advice and help that you can give on how to make my blog more readable,...

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#19. 강철멘탈, 유리멘탈 -- How much insult can you withstand?

I spent most of my formative years in Canada, and really consider myself a Canadian. And true to the Canadian stereotype, I love hockey. If you have spent any amount of time watching hockey games, you would have heard of the "Green Men" of Vancouver, two men in green body suits who mock the opposing team players in the penalty box. Some take the insult better than the others, and undoubtedly, the performance given by the Green Men has some of the hockey players fuming as they leave the penalty box. This is what they do: Apparently, it is...

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#18. 용자 -- Brave or stupid?

Back when I was a schoolchild in Korea, in-classroom discussions weren't really a thing. A part of the reason why was because most of us believed that the most important thing for the students was to do well in tests. If you know anything about the Korean school system, it makes sense -- where you go to university determines your life's trajectory; to go to a good university, you must score well in tests. The majority of the questions given...

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Listening exercise with transcript #3: Execution in North Korea

One of the privileges that you get from speaking Korean is the fact that you have access to a ton of interviews by the North Korean refugees (we call them "탈북자": the letter "탈" is Chinese for "exit." For example, "to escape" is "탈출" in Korean; to wring out water is "탈수". The letter "북" means "north," and "자" means "person": "남자" means "man," "망자" means "the departed (the dead).") The vast majority of these interviews are not translated into any other languages, so speaking Korean means that you have extra insight into the lives of the North Koreans...

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#17. 사골 -- Beating a dead cow

A friend of mine took me out to a very nice fusion restaurant this past weekend. While looking through the menu, I was a bit grossed out by an item called "roasted bone marrow." Even though I'm Korean by birth, I have never been an adventurous eater, so I flat-out refused to try it. I later talked to my mom on the phone about the strange things that people eat these days, and she looked at me strangely, and told me that one of my favourite Korean...

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#16. 의자왕 -- The Korean Casanova

백제 (Baekje) has always had my sympathy. It formed a part of the Three Kingdoms Era of Korea, along with 신라 (Silla) and 고구려 (Goguryeo), but it seems that 백제 was decidedly the weakest of the three kingdoms. 신라 eventually destroyed the other two kingdoms and unified Korea; 고구려, at its heyday, controlled a large part of China and Mongolia, occupying about five times the land the size of the Korean peninsula. 백제, on the other hand, never seems to have...

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#15. 낚시, 떡밥 -- Trolling, or fishing for reaction

The anonymity of the internet sometimes tempts us to do strange things. We are safe to prank people, we can mock people, and we can get involved in a fight. What's the worst that could happen? Some people might get mad at us, but all we have to do is turn off the computer, and all that is behind us. In the anglophone culture, we call this type of behaviour "trolling." There are two theories for the origin of this word. The first hypothesis is...

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#14. 프로 불만러 -- How to say "he complains all the time" in five letters

Once, when I was frequenting a small DC Inside gallery (a Korean equivalent of a subreddit), I got to recognize the handle of this one particular user. He came by the "갤" (how the Koreans call galleries on DC Inside) all the time,  always armed with a new story of how the world has done him some injustice. He was very good at extracting hidden meaning from a mundane gesture. How this stranger walked past him on the street without acknowledging his presence, probably because this stranger was hell-bent on offending him. How his professor assigned...

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#13. 이불킥 -- Looking back to the most embarrassing moment of your life

Any wise person knows that reflecting on the most embarrassing moment of your life right before you try to sleep is a terrible idea. You relive that moment, such as that moment when you felt the need to show some 허세, feel the blush creeping up your neck to your face, and you writhe lying on bed and burrowing into your blanket. UGH. How could I have been so stupid? Koreans have the perfect word to describe your embarrassment. If they see you doing...

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#12. 역주행 -- Every underdog's dream

In looking back at some of my earlier posts, I realized that there is a word that, in theory, means the polar opposite thing of the word "정주행." The word that I have in mind is "역주행." While the letter "정" means "correctly," the letter "역" means "in reverse." Therefore, if "정주행" is describing the movement of a car going forward, "역주행" describes the movement of a car going backwards. In the context of internet slang, however, it means something completely...

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Listening exercise with transcript #2: Let me tell you about the 경상 dialect

On the first listening exercise, I provided the transcript for the first part of a series of two advertisements below. I would like to provide the rest of the transcription today. But before doing so, I need to talk about the dialects ("사투리") of Korea so that you can understand exactly what is going on in that clip. There are several different dialects in Korea, roughly corresponding with the provinces of Korea, and even within the provinces, there...

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