Archive for July, 2010
It’s vacation time in Korea and so Andrew Farrell has entrusted this hallowed website to me for the last five days or so. It’s been a yeoman effort on my part to keep it updated, but something’s come up: I’ve taken the opportunity, while in Canada until the end of August, to do a little traveling [ READ MORE ]
I’ve been home for nearly a month now and I’ve been asked the question time and again: “What’s South Korea like?” As predictable and justified as the question is, I still haven’t an answer for it. How to summarize an entire nation, especially one as dynamic as this? Every country has its points of interest I [ READ MORE ]
Coming to Korea exposes you to a plethora of new germs, and if you teach children of kindergarten age, expect to be bombarded with their little sicknesses daily. I’m sure I was the same at their age, but at least 75 per cent of these kids – even when they’re “seven-year-olds” (actually five to six years [ READ MORE ]
Porn cards are so prominent and outrageous, that they should never become just part of the background in Korea. This is definitely a risk though. The longer you’re here, the more you take a small picture of a woman demeaning herself, strewn about the street for prostitution purposes, as a matter of course. But here at speakingkorea.com, [ READ MORE ]
Coming to another land that speaks a foreign language is great for avoiding those achy little nuances of your home country. Like the provincial day-to-day gossip regarding celebrities or the political scandals that ultimately never amount to anything substantial. Riding the bus or subway no longer yields the frustration of overhearing about somebody’s pregnant fourteen-year-old daughter [ READ MORE ]
English has been adopted and senselessly mutated on countless wonderful occasions in Korean marketing, on t-shirts, and in K-Pop. In Korea, English brings a “coolness” factor apparently not possible with, say, Swahili or Hindu. It is our goal to present you with never-ending examples of this phenomenon. So we’ll start with something close to our home. The [ READ MORE ]
It’s what we have all been waiting for. The summer holidays are finally here. Except, ours last a whole………7 days. You don’t come to a Korean private school for the period out of work. No time to climb Mount Everest, take a boat down the Mekong River, see the Terracotta Army and relax by the Pacific [ READ MORE ]
If in your grand vision of Korea you pictured a pristine, health-obsessed nation that shunned the baser habits that us Westerners engage in on a daily basis, well, you were way off. Many Koreans smoke and drink and engage in prostitution with the best of them, and if this behaviour somehow leads to disastrous health effects [ READ MORE ]
So, what do you like to do when pay day comes around? Go shopping? See a movie? Buy something for your boyfriend or girlfriend? Drink away the remainder of your liver? Nothing? I once knew a guy who treated himself to a prostitute when his monthly cheque arrived on his desk. Compare that to what we [ READ MORE ]
Eleven months ago at Hazeltine National Golf Club, Minnesota, Y.E. Yang became the first Asian man to win one of golf’s four Major tournaments. Yang was always seen as the heir apparent to KJ Choi, not just as the finest Korean golfer on tour, but also as arguably the greatest Asian player in history. His victory, [ READ MORE ]