Of course not, but reader and friend fattycat passes along the latest from KT's "olleh" series of commercials, which have popularized a word some of you think should have made 2009's list of bad Korean English:
It plays on a joke I've heard many times in Asia---from Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese---where a non-native-speaker finds himself in a bad traffic accident, and when the emergency personnel ask him "how are you?" he responds mechanically in the way he'd always been instructed to answer that question. It's certainly how Korean students are told to respond, and when I was teaching I got to a point where I simply stopped asking "how are you?" before each class because students would invariably answer "finethankyouandyou" each and every time.
8 comments:
I find "Look at me! What do you think!" a bit of a rude response. I cant wait until I ask one of my students if they are ok and they respond with it :(
Really one extreme or the other, isn't it. Rather than laughing at the guy who always responds "finethankyouandyou"---and making fun of all the textbooks that tell students to do it this way---they turn it around to make the white guy look like an idiot.
And for the defensive soompi/Kpop-blog crowd, no, I'm not crying racism or anything. I'm just noting another case of rendering English ridiculous.
"My cellphone company helps me act like an asshole in English! Olleh!"
Meh. We all know that the accident was caused by the Korean guy suddently stopping without warning and for no apparent reason ;)
My bigger problem is Korean students who take "How are you?" too literally, and then start describing various ailments or disturbances in their emotional life.
"It's just another way to say hello," I have to explain. "If you're not a close friend, I really don’t care about your problems.”
It's a common joke I've heard from Korean university students in the United States, though our academy's students tend to use responses such as "So-so" (probably the most popular), "I'm good", "Today is a bad day", "Not bad", "Sick!", "I don't know", and "Very, very, very, very good".
Should I be teaching them "I'm fine, and you?" as well? ;)
I teach the kids this song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcTZ9Km7kCQ and encourage them to say anything but 'fine thank you, and you?'
Brian, this isn't the phone company teaching people to act like assholes. It's a reasonable This is the phone company making an ad. It's absurd to expect English in commercials to be proper and having some edifying component. Do you also watch commercials back home and rip it apart for portraying English in the wrong way? Besides, it's a reasonable response to someone driving into you.
Thanks for posting the commercial, though. I've been looking for it for a long time.
those expressions are translated poorly from Korean to English..
i think most people who really learn english wont pay mind to them..
well i hope so
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