나는 한국어를 조금 밖에 못해요

the books i am using

i am sure no korean language textbook is perfect. but i am three lessons from the end of volume one of korean through english and the second volume awaits me on my kitchen table.

there's a lot i liked about the first book: the practicality of the dialogues (to an extent), the repetition. there are other things that bother me; namely, the very inaccurate translations from korean to english. they tell you you're saying one thing and you know you're not.

for instance: in a dialogue about making hotel reservations,

여기있어요

is translated as "Your name is here."

since 여기있어요 has been used in previous lessons, having nothing to do with reservations or names, it's not like the student doesn't know that 여기있어요 does not translate literally as "Your name is here", and since within the context of the lesson it would be completely natural to have translated the line as "Here it is"... why not just do it? why inject a completely arbitrary noun into an otherwise useful, all-purpose statement?

and then there's this one, in a dialogue about phone conversations:

말씀하세요.

which is translated as, "I'm listening."

in this case, i really didn't know what 말씀하세요 meant, but i knew it couldn't mean "I'm listening"... as i knew that no one would use an honorific in the first person. So, I asked, and sure enough, "Please speak" is more like it.

why act like "Please speak" and "I'm listening" are the same thing?

that aside, i am still using the series, as i don't know of anything better, and, again, it's gotten me this far. maybe the first of the 25 lessons in the book were studied in a class with three other students, and a korean teacher; the rest, i have done on my own.

and i have been really enjoying richard harris' roadmap to korean. this unfortunate sentance, however (from the second edition, no less) is haunting me:

Although a knowledge of han-cha does not facilitate a greater understanding of Korean grammar, it does provide the student with a dearth of new information and knowledge about two cultures steeped in thousands of years of history, tradition and culture.

i still recommend the book; i've gotten a lot out of it. it has answered in full a number of questions that, when i asked them of native korean speakers, i was told "it just is that way. there's no explanation." well, apparently, in many cases, there is.

naturally, if anybody wants to make a book recommendation, please leave a comment.

VAMPIRE/흡혈귀

i asked 경애 some months ago: what's the korean word for vampire?

(that'd be, "vampire 한국어로 뭐예요?")

and she told me there wasn't a korean word for "vampire".

i'll never forgive her. because there IS a korean word for vampire, and it's 흡혈귀. you see it above in the image, written out for me by artist sunkoo yuh, when i visited him in his studio in athens georgia for an article for KQ. i'll always keep this, because it's the only "original" sunkoo yuh i'm going to be able to afford for some years to come.

sunkoo does not particularly like vampires, and all the fangs in his work, he told me, are more guardian-oriented than vampire-oriented. korean culture is someone lacking in vampire lore. i reviewed a really bad k-drama called freeze (nicely transliterated hangul title: 프리즈) that went a long way to proving this. the only good thing about 프리즈 was its very, very handsome star. oh, i'm hardly the only one who thinks so... watch this korean tv clip about 프리즈 and you may soon be asking yourself, "'spontaneous orgasm by a television host' 한국어로 뭐예요?"

catching up on k-dramas

when the baby came, we really got caught in the undertow of k-dramas. i had about seventy bazillion hours of dramas to review for KQ, none of which were any good, all of which were keeping us from our daily faves -- 별난 여자 별난 남자, 미우나 고우나, and 아줌마가 간다 (bizarre bunch, likeable or not, and here comes ajumma).

watching any of these shows usually happened (and still often does) in three minute increments, as the baby or one of the dogs would need something else and we'd end up pausing the action for another four or five hours. literally.

for weeks, we were between 97% and 99% capacity on our DVR, always worrying that the next day's episodes would not have room to tape. we were always behind... 언제나 바빠요.

then slowly we started to catch up. i feed claudia on the couch and i don't think she has ever had a bottle without a k-drama playing in the background! hopefully she is soaking in a lot of korean.

i recently got through the end of 아줌마가 간다. the prolonged death of jaegwang left me irritated throughout the last episodes but i found actor 이 세창 (could have that spelling wrong) better than i had initially thought he was, throughout his "illness" and redemption. i really loved this drama, not only because it had one of THE BEST K-DRAMA THEMES OF ALL TIME, and i am dying to find an mp3 of it.

we are so behind on bizarre bunch that we are only up to kiwoong and haein's wedding, and the series showing ended last week. so we have a lot to watch. a new drama began to replace bizarre, now following likeable or not -- i believe it is called hearts of nineteen. i missed taping the first one but have the second, and ben and i will check it out.

i have decided that out of every actor on our three favorite dramas, my by-far favorite is 안 석환 (ahn seok hwan), as byungdoo on bizarre bunch.

second would be 김 지석 (kim ji seok) as baekho on likeable or not.

i consider these k-dramas an important part of my korean language learning. receptive language always precedes expressive language. i am always hearing things that i know, or can piece together, on these dramas, and i know it helps "tuck them into" my brain.

this is a good place to mention my k-drama subtitles set on flickr. those subtitles can be pretty funny sometimes, and i try to document it whenever we see a great one!

유자차

a friend recommended we buy some 유자차 when ben had a cold. ben made it as tea, as our friend had suggested he do. he didn't care for it much.

i ignored it in the fridge for a few months until the day that i had a taste for, well, marmelade. and i found that 유자차 did the job quite nicely.

i have yet to tell any korean friends or acquaintances "hey, i put 유자차 on peanut butter sandwiches -- and i sometimes put it in yogurt, and in cottage cheese." i'm interested to see what the reaction will be.

come on, somebody uses this stuff for something other than just tea, right? it's got that perfect sweet/bitterness, all the citrus shreds are so nice... i bet if you mix some of this stuff into pound cake batter it's pretty good, too. i think there are more applications for it than have been yet tried.

anybody else use 유자차 in anything other than hot water?

rainy day, korean cooking

our social plans of playground and walk to south street with jaime and abby got rained out today. for now, the baby is in her bumbo seat listening to yo-yo ma's bach cello suites, and i have started some cooking.

our korean dishes have always been pretty limited at home. we make 김치, usually a cabbage and daikon one from a madhur jaffrey cookbook. i have never preferred any kimchi recipe to that one. from the korean kitchen by copeland marks, we have for years made 닭고추장보금 (i may go try to look up that spelling in hangul and correct it later) -- dak gochu jang boekum -- which we make with bite-sized pieces of chicken thigh meat. we have taken it to picnics and seen it disappear, and we eat it all year long, calling it "korean chicken".

we do make 돌솓 비빔밥 in stone bowls, and in these bowls i once made ben a "bibimbirthday cake" which very realistically mimicked a bowl of bibimbap, right down to the raw egg on top (created with mango sorbet). a how-to for this cake was printed in one of the first issues of korean quarterly to which i contributed.

this past winter i began extending my repetoire of korean dishes to include 김치 찌개, in which i frequently used dried shitake mushrooms and fresh spinach. pulmuone brand foods (풀무원) makes a type of tofu that i particularly like to use in this, and it is marked 째개용 on the package, which might mean "jigae-style" or "good for stews". maybe someone will tell me.

but that was pretty much the extent of my korean cooking until recently, when i attempted -- and succeeded with -- 냉면. we needed something for summer, and although 냉면 creates a few hours of hot kitchen with the stock-making and egg-boiling, it pays off over the next few das when it is very easy to make a delicious -- cool -- meal.

so my confidence was up when i found migi's kitchen and did indeed make the best 떡볶이 i have ever tasted. and it's not much harder to make than, say, popcorn! 정말!

so, while on this rainy day i am merely making stock for 냉면 and some 김치, i am thinking about getting fancy soon and trying migi's recipe for 딸기 수제비 -- strawberry gnocci, which is made in a broth that contains vegetables and some dried anchovies and kelp.

붕어빵/goldfish bread (aka "chocolate fish waffles")

while at the SUPER H-MART in atlanta georgia in february, we happened upon some snacks being made under a sign that said "FISH WAFFLES".

we were willing to try fish waffles. there was little risk; we saw that they were not fish-flavored waffles, but simply sweet, filled waffles made in fish-shaped irons. they came with two filling choices: red bean, or chocolate.

having at some point convinced myself that i do not like sweet red bean paste (i since find that i was wrong about that), we ordered some chocolate-filled fish waffles.

there was an older man making them, and watching me take pictures of him making them. "재미있어요!" i told him. ("it's interesting!") "재미있어요," he agreed.

when e-mailing artist sunkoo yuh -- whom we had been visiting in georgia -- later, he told me that these "fish waffles" were called 붕어빵. i didn't ask for a literal translation, but later, watching one of our favorite k-dramas, 미우나 고우나 (likeable or not), we saw a character bring "fish waffles" home -- referring to them as "goldfish bread".

we have since seen that 붕어빵 can be purchased frozen. we have yet to try any of the make-at-home types. but next time we are in atlanta... it's back to the irons at SUPER H-MART for us. 정말 맛있었어요!

조용한 가족/the quiet family

this is one of the first korean films i ever saw. i was telling a friend today that i thought it would be an excellent introduction to korean film for her in particular because a) it's funny b) it's bloody c) it features actors who went on some films later to do amazing, amazing things -- and i'm going to take a phonetic stab at this, here, because that's what this blog is for -- 송 강호 (song kang-ho) and 최만식(choi min-sik). (i'll admit i froze up on "choi" and looked it up.)

this is perhaps the slimmest i've ever seen song kang-ho -- who is in many of my favorite korean films (memories of murder, sympathy for mr. vengeance.) and choi min-sik -- whom i always think of as "the korean gary oldman" -- is his regular chameleon self here, almost unrecognizable as the man who would play oh dae-su in oldboy.

even more exciting, ben and i realized in re-watching this film again last night, is the fact that the father in 조용한 가족 is "mr. hwangbo" from one of our favorite dramas -- 아줌마가 간다 (here comes ajumma).