An amusing episode on Korean radio-
So I was here for a good two weeks having to listen to
Korean radio in my car.
Our CD’s hadn’t arrived yet and I was still learning my way
around to mess with the MP3 player while I was driving.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I really don’t
car for their radio formats here.
It’s not that I don’t mind the music, a little different but
that’s ok. It’s
that they always need to talk and talk and talk. Play a song, talk over half of it,
then talk for another ten minutes then play another song and talk over
that. It’s enough
to drive you crazy.
Anyway, the one thing you can always find (especially when
flipping the channels looking for anything that isn’t Korean talk) is the
educational broadcasting channel, always teaching people English. This usually has the format of one
American and one Korean, going over simple phrases and such in English and
explaining them. Feeling
a need to brush up on my English and the fact that they are at least talking
about something I can understand, I would find myself listening to that for a
while, at least to break up the drives to work.
One of the “advanced” features they do is to
take a clip from a movie, maybe 5 minutes of dialogue and then break it down
into the meanings of all the slang and colloquialisms. Pretty useful, I think. Certainly back in the day when I
took Latin, it would have been great to get scenes in conversational Latin you
could analyze to improve your knowledge.
Anyway, I’m driving along and they do one of these
scenes from a movie. I happen
to recognize the movie. It’s
“Rounders” and it’s a scene where Edward Norton is getting
worked over by some cops.
And as the scene goes on, it get raunchier and raunchier, with vivid descriptions
of what will happen to Edward Norton’s character if he gets sent to prison
as well and his character’s vivid descriptions of the assumed homosexual relationship
between the two cops. The
F-word is going off every 5 seconds and this is on the Korean equivalent of
PBS.
I was laughing at that, but I almost had to pull over when
they did the analysis afterwards. The American girl had to go
through this whole scene more or less line by line and she was so trying to
gloss as much as possible. It
was great to hear her trying to soften the meaning of everything into things
like “he’s very angry at the police right now” and so forth. A lifetime of American
FCC guidelines also meant she bring herself to actually repeat any of the actually
dialogue that was said. It
was totally clear she was mortified and was trying to get through the segment
as quickly as possible. Meanwhile the Korean announcer
had no problems repeating every word there, and kept bringing up more profanity
and asking for explanation.
“ ‘You’re a f*****g c**ks****r’, now what does
that mean, Kristen?”
I was dying.
I don’t know what program content director chose to
use that scene for educational purposes, but it was the funniest bit I’ve
seen in sometime. Gotta love
the learning process sometimes.
C