#39. 발암 -- It's killing me!

Here's an expression that I'm not a huge fan of, but it is used widely as of a couple of years ago. There's some degree of belief among the Koreans (although not nearly as widespread as fan death, I think!) that stress causes cancer. FYI, it seems that there's no real evidence that stress causes cancer at the moment. Anyway, if you frequent the Korean internet, you will undoubtedly see a lot of stress-inducing users. Some of them are so blinded by their own convictions that they refuse to have a conversation, preferring to more or less resort...

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#38. Knowing your internet literature

Today, I was browsing the Korean websites as usual, when I came across the following post (which I re-create below for the ease of reading.) Title: 놀이공원이 없는 마을에서 (In a village that has no amusement parks) Text (very short): 이장님이 허락한 아이들의 유일한 마약 (The only drug that the mayor allowed the children to access) Accompanying gif: A lot of posts in Korean internet forums are very short, like this one. They are intended for a quick chuckle (or a quick...

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#37. 동공지진 -- Oh, Sh!t

Have you ever had that experience, where you know you screwed up, and you have no idea how to get yourself out of the situation? You're embarrassed, you feel terrible, you want to apologize but you're not sure how things will go from there, and there doesn't seem to be much else that you can do. You're stuck and you know it. And you can't bring yourself to make eye contact with anyone. So you carefully control your gaze, but of course, that means...

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#36. 부심 -- Be proud of who you are (but don't be overly so)

If you have spent any time in Korea, or if you have any friends who identify culturally with Korea, you might have noticed that they are pretty humble about their achievements. This probably stems from the culture of putting the community first before yourself, and it is one of the most intricate aspects of the Korean culture that I cannot explain in a single post. The Koreans react more strongly even to what we call humblebrag (where people pretend...

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Listening exercise with transcript #6: Attention!

Here is a short video clip of some women talking to each other. Although it is getting better, in an organizational setting (most notably in military, corporate setting, or in schools,) Koreans like to have something called "군기." This non-slang word coming from Chinese roots mean the rules and standards of an army. The letter "군" is Chinese for "army," for example "군대" means "army" and "장군" means a "general." The letter "기" is Chinese for "discipline." For example, the word "기강" also means "discipline." If a group of people have the military-like...

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#35. 월급루팡 -- A very very sweet job

This is a quick post because I am on a vacation! While I was packing for my vacation, I started thinking about how I still get paid from my job during the time that I'm away even though I am not really working, and how my job really is pretty sweet! That being said, there are sweeter jobs online. Once I read about a software engineer who hired someone else at a lower price than his salary to do all of his work, and basically got free money for years...

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#34. 도배 -- Making sure that you get noticed (and hated, as a bonus)

If you wanted to get noticed in a large online community such as Reddit, what would you do? I suppose if I were really desperate, I could try submitting the same post over and over again, just to make sure that it gets noticed. Looks like there's an event going on where the owner of the website is choosing someone at random. I suppose it works; but it's annoying, and most websites have some rules against repeat submissions. Korea is no exception;...

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