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Korea's Mess of Teaching and Employing English (Engrish)

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2 Typo's in 2 words from a scene in SBS's drama, Athena This post was inspired from a subtitle typo in a Korean drama called Athena , currently airing on Mondays and Tuesdays on SBS. It is nice that they were able to film scenes in places as beautiful as New Zealand, but the producers might want to get some editing staff who can actually edit  English subtitles properly. In the above image, not only is the city of Auckland misspelled, New Zealand is written as NEWZEALAND, in all caps and without the spacing. So, if you are someone from SBS, please keep your nationally televised typos to a minimum. It really grinds my gears and is kind of a national embarrassment considering all the money spent on English education here. And please don't get me started on all the spelling errors and grammatical mistakes I've seen at Korea's many national museums. For instance, while visiting the National Museum of Korea  in Seoul a few years ago, I noticed that about three quart...
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Korea vs. Japan

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Last night I had the unfortunate experience of witnessing yet another lamentable loss by the Korean national football team. The venue: AFC Asian Cup 2011 Semi-finals at Doha. There are only a handful things more important to most South Koreans than beating Japan in a globally televised sporting event, including but not limited to, North Korea, comfort women, the Dokdo islets (Liancourt Rocks/Takeshima), and the naming of the East Sea (Sea of Japan), not in any particular order. While I hope to go into detail on the above topics in future posts, in this post, I want to focus on why every such sporting event is a "must-win" game for Korea. First of all, the results. Japan defeated Korea 3-0 on penalties, 2-2 a.e.t. (after extra time). Korea struck the first goal after Park Ji-Sung earns a penalty for Ki Sung-Yueng in the 23rd minute. Japan is able to draw in the 36th minute, thanks to Maeda's goal. In the second half, Korea concedes a penalty to Honda in the 97th minut...
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Why Korean Sports Fans Love Korean Star Players

18 January 2011 By Tim Lee Seoul, Korea – “Park Chan-Ho is leaving the MLB???” “Choo Shin-Soo is staying with the Indians!?” For several weeks, this was all that could be heard by MLB (Major League Baseball) fans in Korea. Being in Korea, it is easy to overhear baseball fans (fanatics?) argue about which of their favorite Korean-born MLB players are doing great and which ones are making bad career moves. My question is: why do Korean MLB fans seem only to support and follow teams that have a Korean-born player? There are many great baseball players in the MLB- Alex Rodriguez, Albert Pujols, and Miguel Cabrera to name a few- but most Korean sports news channels only have segments on how Korean players are doing in the MLB. I guess this is very similar to what happens in professional soccer. Just like baseball, fans of foreign soccer leagues (such as the English Premier League) only want to talk about teams that have a famous Korean soccer player in their roster. We’ve all heard how ...
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Answering the Writer's Call

Greetings everyone. First of all, thank you all for reading this. I really appreciate it. I guess this will be my first post on my first blog. There is always a beginning; and for me, that beginning is now. For a long time now, I've wanted to go into writing. Haven't you always wondered how those great writers started out? Did they feel a sudden inspiration to start jotting down their thoughts? Or perhaps they saw some marvelous landmark or vacationed at a picturesque resort. Maybe a relative or acquaintance mentioned something, perhaps even just hinted at something. "Honey, the lights really have a strange quality to them this time of year, don't they?" Ring a bell? Supposedly, William Faulkner's wife's casual comment gave Faulkner an idea for a title for one of his novels. Whether this is fact or myth, we can't really tell, but it goes to show how a single idea can transform a person's very thoughts, and perhaps lead to a great work o...
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