KoreanClass101.com Blog

Sorry for my lack of entry last Tuesday! I’m starting Uni in a few days, and last week I decided I would be clever and get ahead in the material, which sort of not-so-cleverly threw me off my schedule with everything else. But here I am, back again~ and this time, I thought I would “review” an artist that I really enjoy

So, allow me to introduce you all to … Drunken Tiger, or 드렁큰타이거.

Drunken Tiger is a hip hop group that released their first album in 1999. With influential and even controversial lyrics, Drunken Tiger is often seen as being one of the pioneers of Korean hip hop, in a time when pop still heavily dominated the music scene. While not much has changed and pop is still perhaps the biggest seller, it was artists like Drunken Tiger that began to catch the attention of the public. Sometimes it was good attention, sometimes it was bad, but one thing was for sure: they were noticed, and it was the hard work of Drunken Tiger and other hip hop artists around that time that paved the way for hip hop in Korea today. With artists like Drunken Tiger, the music isn’t about the bling or the girls or the sex or the drugs; it’s about the music and the message.

Drunken Tiger’s lineup has changed over the years, with Tiger JK being a constant but Micky Eyes, DJ Shine and DJ Jhig coming and going, and now Tiger JK carries it on alone.

The group have released seven albums in total, the latest of which was released last year, titled Sky Is The Limit. Their sound is pretty much pure hip hop and rap, but Tiger JK has an interest in reggae which really comes through in some of the songs, especially throughout the sixth album 1945 Liberation.

Their stuff is definitely worth a try, so I come bearing MVs! Yay for YouTube XD

난 널 원해 This is from their first album, Year of the Tiger

Good Life This is from their third album, The Legend of ..

Is Ask Hizay This is also from their third album

남자기 때문에 This one is from their fourth album, 뿌리

심의에 안 걸리는 사랑노래 (there’s 1 min of talking at the start of this) This is from their sixth album, 1945 Liberation, which was the first release of Drunken Tiger being a one-man band

8:45 Heaven This one is from their seventh album, Sky Is The Limit

내가 싫다 And this is also from Sky Is The Limit

Please enjoy them! I think Drunken Tiger are great, and I have a lot of respect for Tiger JK.

The local Korean grocery store can be a cultural connection that, for many, goes largely untapped. The most obvious link to Korea through the local grocery store is the food. The store can be a source for many spices and foods not found in a regular chain grocery store. These include the mundane like curry powder, red pepper powder, soy sauce, fish sauce (젓갈) as well as the more hard to find like 고추장, 된장, 쌈장, 미역, and Korean soda pop and 요구르트 (my children love that stuff).

The best food stuffs to get in the grocery store are the prepared foods. Sure, you can get “Wong’s Kimchi” as your local Raleys or Vons but it is horrible, pasteurized, and not much more than pepper and cabbage. Each Korean market will have different tasting 김치 because the owners typically prepare it right thereaccording to their own unique recipe. Just like 김치 from different provinces in Korea will taste different, it will be different in each store. (My wife says that 전라도 김치 is 최고!) You can get a variety of prepared foods besides 김치, too. Usually you can find many different 반찬, of varying degrees of goodness.

Besides food, the Korean grocery store can be a great source of many things non-food like cosmetics, music CDs, kitchen supplies (like chopsticks, rice bowls, rice cookers, and huge buckets that you won’t find anywhere else), bath supplies (like 때타올, soaps, 등등) as well as the ever-popular Korean dramas. The stores usually record the dramas direct from television and then rent the DVDs or tapes. Mostly, these don’t have English subtitles, so you should ask first if that is important to you.

The most overlooked resource that the Korean market has to offer is free, that is the language connection. Most Korean markets I have been in offer free newspapers, phone directories and this time of year, calendars. But they also offer someone to talk to in Korean! The store owners know varying degrees of English and are all too happy to help you speak a bit of Korean, especially if you are a regular customer. If you haven’t discovered your local Korean grocery store, check your yellow pages and give them a visit. Let me know how it goes.

Korean is not the easiest language to learn, and especially when it comes to vocabulary, the speed at which your vocabulary expands is never quite satisfactory. But when there’s a will to learn Korean, there will always be a way to expand your vocabulary. Studying with our regular podcast lessons in various levels and using the review tracks and PDFs to study further details is a very good way of course, and here’s another way of learning more Korean words that we’d like to suggest.

We decided to call it “Korean Word Relay”, and we’ve tried making a few of them, hoping that these videos will help you learn more Korean words and also give our listeners a chance to test their vocabulary!

Please give us your feedback on this series, and we will do our best to improve it and make it a regular part of our program!

Thank you!

한국어는 배우기에 그렇게 쉬운 언어가 아니죠. 특히 어휘가 그렇죠. 어휘력이 확장되는 속도가 좀처럼 만족스럽지 않으니까요. 하지만 한국어를 배우고자 하는 뜻이 있다면 언제나 길이 있습니다! 여러 레벨로 나뉘어져 있는 저희 정규 팟캐스트 레슨들을 들으면서 리뷰 트랙과 PDF를 이용해 보충 학습을 하는 것도 물론 좋은 방법이고, 여기에서 소개해 드리는 새로운 단어 학습 방법을 이용해 보셔도 좋을 거예요.

이 시리즈를 [한국어 단어 릴레이]라고 부르기로 했는데, 몇 개 만들어 보았어요. 여러분들이 새로운 한국어 단어를 배우는 데에, 그리고 자신의 어휘력을 측정해 보는 데에 도움이 되기를 바라는 마음에서요.

비디오를 한 번 보시고 피드백을 주시면, 더 좋게 만들어서 저희 한국어 학습 프로그램의 정규 시리즈로 만들 수 있도록 할게요!

감사합니다!

Today I want to start sharing with you some of the “struggles” at the orphanage.  By that,  I mean the kinds of things that go on that I don’t think would happen in a similar environment in the Western world.  Some of it is cultural for sure, but other things are just a function of the situation.

The floor at the orphanage is dirty.  There is no other word to describe it.  They have a few dogs that do all sorts of unspeakable things on it (including the one that is currently in heat).  The kids are always eating in the living room and spilling things, leaving crumbs and the like for the next guy to find.

It gets cleaned each day, but “clean” seems to have a very different definition.  It isn’t cleaned with soap - ever.  Usually just a broom, and on a good day, a vacuum cleaner.  From my perspective with 25 boys living in the same space, that really isn’t acceptable.  It is a ripe breeding ground for all sorts of things to get passed around.

And yet, Josh and I have tried to suggest real cleaning (like with bleach) but it seems to fall on deaf ears.  There are a bunch of excuses for why bleach isn’t appropriate.  I wish I understood this issue better.  I suspect that it is cultural, because it is  the same way at my school. The school is so dirty, it would have caused the custodial staff from the school I taught at in America to blush.  Each day the kids sweep and mop the floors, but it really just amounts to pushing the dirt to a different corner, and using water to help.  Soap isn’t part of the process!  I know I’m not alone in this.  Most of my friends report similar practices at their schools too.

So, when it comes to the orphanage, health is a big concern.  The kids suffer from a lot of infections that are easily spread in communal living.  It seems like this could be managed a bit better.  Just this week, the dog bled all over the floor since she’s in heat…and the solution seemed to be using tissue to wipe it up!!  Josh had the day off, so he went to buy some bleach and cleaned the floor….probably the second time in a year that the floor has been cleaned like that…but then the dog came back inside and bled everywhere again!

It isn’t our job to tell the staff there how to do things better, in fact that’s kind of taboo in Korea to begin with, so what do you think about it?  What would you do?

If you’re like me, you Fridays are your 재일 좋아하는 날 not because it’s the weekend, (although that is a good reason too ^^) but because our very own 선현우 선생님 comes out with his new audio blog.  It’s a great way to catch a glimpse of Korean culture and certainly a great way to practice some listening skills.

If you’re like me, there is always some new vocabulary in his lessons.  Having an advanced vocabulary is one of the hardest things to develop when learning a foreign language.  Take the blog about blood donation for example.  I probably talk about blood donation once or twice a year in English, but of course, I know the word.  In my Korean life, there is a vanishingly small chance that I would ever need to say that word…but I still want to know it.

The best way to learn new words is to use them.  When I was teaching elementary school in America, we were told that people need to use a word 6 times before it becomes part of their personal mental dictionary.  So practice is a must!

I decided that I would undertake a little project of my own to help.  I went back through all the audio blogs and made a list of the words or phrases I still didn’t know.  Then I fired up my webcam and recorded a short video using each of those words.  I made up some of my own sentences, I practiced a bunch, and did several takes, which of course further helped to cement the words in my brain.  Here’s what I came up with:

I’d love for you to post your own video responses!  Or make your own from any of the previous lessons.  Even making a video for 5 or 6 words will really help!

We’ve made a guide video that explains how to enjoy studying Korean with KoreanClass101.com! And here’s the youtube video! We hope you enjoy watching it, and also learn some now words and phrases from the bilingual lines!

Thank you!

Dear listeners,

We truly appreciate all of your continued support for our podcast and your active participation in the lesson comments, the blog comments, and the forum posts. Thank you so much! 정말 감사해요. 앞으로도 재미있고 유익한, 좋은 podcast를 만들어 갈 수 있도록 열심히 노력하겠습니다. While we continue to do our best on our end to make fun, enjoyable and useful lessons for you, we need your help in spreading the word!

If you think we’re doing a job, (we hope you do!) please let more people know about us by voting for us. You can see two small buttons at the bottom of the right-hand side menu on our site.

http://www.koreanclass101.com/index.php

If you have an iTunes account, please write in a simple review and provide feedback on what other people wrote.

Here’s the link to go to the iTunes review page! (Or click on the image above.)

And if you will, please also click on the little podcast alley button, and you can vote for us by writing in a few lines, which will put us at a higher ranking in the podcast list!

Direct link to Podcast Alley

Doing this can take up a few minutes of your time, but it’ll help us soooo much in making better and better podcasts and a lot more useful material!

Thanks very much, everyone! 감사합니다! We will keep doing our best!

We do a lot of shopping at the local Korean grocery store. It isn’t that local–about 40 minutes away–but whenever we are in the neighborhood we stock up on the essentials, namely, 라면, 초코파이, 김, 된장/고추장, and 김치.

We typically buy our 김치 rather than make it more out of convenience than anything. My wife does make good 김치 but finding the time to get it all done is the hardest part, so we buy. Usually the 김치 is pretty good, not great, and the flavor changes according to the season. The flavors can change according to what part of the 배추 leaf is used as well. This last bottle of 김치 was not my wife’s favorite. She likes the yellow leafy 배추 but that bottle of 김치had green leaves. She said it was not as flavorful and it went sour in a bad way. The bottle is still sitting in my fridge. She can’t throw it away for some reason. You know the saying “when life gives you lemons make lemonade?” Well, I say when life gives you bad 김치 make 김치찌개. One day…

일숙씨: My favorite 김치 that I remember when I was a young girl are 오이김치 and 굴김치(baby oyster in 배추김치) I say when you like to eat the food the natives enjoy you will learn the language easier. Koreans love food and 김치 is a staple of the Korean diet. If you like to eat Korean food then you will have more opportunities to be with the natives and see the culture or characteristics of the people. The language is a living thing that evolves and changes according to the situation and changing culture and ideas in that society. Good luck learning Korean. I’m still learning Korean even though Korean is my mother language.

Enjoy all kinds of 김치!

화이팅!!

Friday has come around again, and that usually means a story about the orphan children I work with. However, today I want to take the opportunity to tell you about something I got to do last weekend.

There are a lot of foreigners in Korea. Many are English teachers. But there are also lots of migrant workers and students from all over the world. When Koreans meet a foreigner who can speak Korean, even something as elementary as 안녕하세요?, they are really impressed. Part of the reason in that the westerners who stick out the most here don’t often bother to learn a lot of Korean. If you come to Korea, and start a conversation with a taxi driver, a shop clerk, or a waitress, you are bound to get complimented with “와! 우리말 되게 잘 하시네요!” (Wow! You really speak Korean so well!)

Korean-speaking foreigners are something of a novelty here, so there are some TV shows that feature foreigners doing all kinds of things in Korean . The Lunar New Year is approaching, and apparently every year, they have a game show for foreigners - played entirely in Korean. This year, I managed to get a space on the show!

Now, among English teachers, I am pretty proud of my Korean level. But I was up against a completely different league in this game show. Out of 100 competitors there were perhaps 6 from English speaking countries. Everyone else was here as a full time studen from China, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia.. They are really really good.

Anyway, the game show was “도전 걸든벨,” Golden Bell is a quiz show. Each contestant has a whiteboard, and they write an answer to the question. If you get it wrong, you’re out. The last person surviving has to answer a few additional questions. If they get that far, the will “ring the golden bell” and in our case, come home with about $4,000.

The whole experience was really loads of fun. I’ll tell you right now that I didn’t win - and I’m not even sure I’ll make it on the broadcast. The game took several hours, and only 50 minutes will be shown on TV, so…you do the math. When you get a question wrong, the announcer might come over and interview you. I’d love the chance to do the interview over again, cause I really made a lot of mistakes… but see if you can pick up something from a recent KClass lesson.

When they asked the question, the showed a picture on the screen, and asked us to write the name of the animation. Now, I really don’t know anything about Korean animation, so I knew I was cooked. I just wrote down the silliest answer I could think of: 마시마로. The picture was actually more like this.

Anyway, he came over to me, and asked what I wrote and why. I responded with “저는 한국 애니메이션대하서 아무 것도 모라요.” (Check Intermediate lesson 4) Then I fumbled through the rest of the interview, even managing to sing this song!

After lunch we got to play a second round, but I got out on the first question! Too bad.. cause those questions were a bit easier than the first round! All in all, I think I could have answered about 60-70% of them right, had I not been eliminated so early!

It was a great day, and I really had to practice my listening skills, because no one was giving directions in English!

Hi everyone. Back with another Korean 간판(signboard). This is not “funny” but very interesting.

I live just across the street from my university so it’s very convenient whenever I receive a last-minute phone call to cancel an appointment and also when I want to meet someone around school.

One day, a friend of mine from Australia called me and asked,

“Do you want to have lunch together?”

So I said,

“Yes, where shall we meet? Where do you want to go?”

So she said that she wanted to go to “김네” but I had never heard of such place near my university so I asked her back, “김네? (wondering what it could mean) Where is it? I don’t think I know the place.”

She sounded surprised that I didn’t know this place because it was literally just around the corner from my house. And the place she took me to was this place in the photo.

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Do you get it now?

My friend had been in Korea only for a few weeks and she wasn’t really aware of the fact that a lot of Korean words can be written in Chinese characters as well, although we pronounce them differently from how the Chinese or Japanese do. (Learn more about this in this newsfeed)

So basically MOST Korean people, if they look at this name “김家네” and read it as “김가네” because家(가, meaning ‘house’ or ‘family) is one of the basic Hanja(Chinese character) words that they learn in elementary school, and get to see everywhere. I’m not trying to say that my friend was ignorant of what she was supposed to know, and actually her Korean got really better during her stay. When I saw this shop again on my way home the other day, I wanted to share with you all of you readers how 한자(Hanja) is very commonly found in Korea.

And this is a very clever name too, because 김(as in 김밥=Kimbap) means laver (and I’m sure you know what 김밥 is. If you don’t, please see the photos below.)

“네”, when it’s attached to “a family name + 가(家: house/family)”, means (again) “house” or “family”. And “김” happens to be the word for both “laver” but also the most common family name. So if it weren’t a shop name, 김가네(金家네) means [Kim’s family] or [the Kims].

The “ㅇ가네” expression is not so commonly used these days, but it’s still a clever restaurant name to give people a very familiar and intimate feeling, while being very obvious that they sell as well.
Alright. Thank you for reading, and see you next week!