Category: Korean

I Became the Chef of the Dragon King

I Became the Chef of the Dragon King is a combination of colorful art, cute character and mascot designs, an inevitable romance and lots of delicious-looking food. It won’t rock your world or anything, but it’s harmless fluff that is great for passing the time. I just wish there were more chapters.

Summary (from Mangadex): Cheong Shim threw herself into the sea of Indangsu! What will happen when she wakes up in a lazy dragon’s dungeon? Meet many cute monsters while living a delicious, symbiotic life!

As you can see from the cover art, Cheong Shim has a very cutesy design, and a cute, super ditzy personality to match. The reason she threw herself into the sea is not to commit suicide but so her ailing father could receive 300 bags of rice and eventually receive healing from Buddha. From that alone you can see how naive she is.

But it’s not the annoying kind of naive. She doesn’t go overboard being all cheerful and Pollyanna. She seems a little down at times, she suffers setbacks, she doesn’t want to get eaten by the dragon, and she pushes back reasonably enough when the dragon makes illogical demands.

All this to say that the main appeal of I Became the Chef of the Dragon King is the charming main character. Yes, Cheong Shim is very much a Mary Sue, but in a manageable, believable way. She didn’t win the Dragon King over completely in a day, and even her food isn’t that wonderful. One of her dishes was so salty it was almost inedible. Just like the meatballs I had last night… =_=

So since she’s sweet and hardworking, but not completely perfect, it’s easy to root for Cheong Shim as she tries to make a peaceful life for herself in the dragon’s abode. That’s the main reason why I’m following the series. 

Although the series will supposedly be about winning the Dragon King over with food, only 7 chapters are out so far (as of early May 2020). In those chapters, Cheong Shim has only made two dishes, so if you’re here for delicious food pics and recipes, you have a long wait ahead.

If you’re reading it for romance, you’re out of luck again. So far the (admittedly cute) Dragon King only finds her to be a somewhat intriguing annoyance. And he himself is a bit grumpy and whiny, so it’s hard to ship them together. Though I suppose one would be grumpy if a noisy squatter suddenly moved into your house.

All in all, I Became the Chef of the Dragon King has made a very promising start. I’m looking forward to seeing more tasty-looking meals once Cheong Shim gets a set of cooking tools together. I’d also like to see the cute mascots on the cover being introduced. And of course, mustn’t forget the romance! I’ll update this post when the series is complete/much further along. Until then!

Korean and Cantonese language goals for 2020!

It’s January, a time when everyone sets goals for learning and self-improvement! So I’m also jumping on the bandwagon…

…Or that was the plan, but I realize I don’t have any serious plans for Cantonese lately. I’ve realized my stumbling block is the inability to make the transition from manufactured dialogues meant for learners to actual native-speaker material. In every language there’s a gap between the written language and the spoken one. But in Cantonese it’s even worse because they’re two different languages.

Last year, I looked around online to try and find a solution. Something to help me cross the intermediate plateau I’d reached. My research led me to two learning packages that people have offered for sale that feature just that kind of native Cantonese material, but I didn’t act on it and then I lost the links.

Cantonese Goal:

Sometime in 2020, track those packages down and give them a try to see if they can help me understand native material better. My long-term goal for the language isn’t complicated. I just want to be able to follow the occasional movie, Hong Kong drama and cooking/variety show online.

Korean Goal:

Long-term, I want to be able to read raw manhwa. That’s it. I’m not that into K-dramas, and anything that’s good will be immediately subbed anyway.

As I mentioned in my last post on learning Korean, I need to work hard on my grammar. Vocabulary is coming along well thanks to Memrise and other sources, but just knowing words isn’t enough. From now till the end of April, my goal is to make it through the extremely boring but helpful Korean Culture Series & Quick Korean lessons on Youtube. I only have 66 lessons left to go, so I could be done by early March if I did a lesson a day.

Once I get those done, I will return with updated goals for the language. Korean is going to be a bigger focus than Cantonese, mostly because there are far more free and useful resources out there so it’s an easier process. See you in a couple of months with an update, God willing!

80 lessons of Talk to me in Korean under my belt!

I mentioned ages ago that I’ve been learning Korean idly for a while. And that most of my work is being done thanks to Talk to me in Korean – the website and the Memrise version. I promised to come back and report on my progress after two levels but now I’m almost done with the third level, so better late than never. Should mention the main means I’ve been using to learn Korean:

-Mainly going through the Talk to me in Korean lessons at a rate of two or three lessons a week. Listening to the podcasts and reading the PDFs doesn’t take that long, but practising sentences on Memrise takes longer and is, frankly, a little bit boring but really helpful for making the lessons stick on my head.

-Learning more vocab through a variety of other Memrise lessons.

  • Learned about 400 words through the Korean beginner vocabulary course.
  • Learned almost 600 words so far through the How to Study Korean Unit 1 course. Some overlap with the previous course.
  • Learned almost 170 words through the Korean through Hanja course. Because I know Japanese, I find Hanja EXTREMELY helpful when trying to learn Korean. If you have a Japanese or Chinese/Cantonese background, definitely go through hanja when trying to memorize intermediate and advanced vocabulary. It will make sooo much more sense, and once you learn what sound maps unto what sound (e.g. “ten” in Japanese usually becomes “chon” in Korean, “tai” becomes “che” etc), with a little context you can often guess what a word is supposed to be without a dictionary.
  • Watched a lot of the videos on Learn Korean with GO! Billy Korean channel. His explanations are excellent because he looks at things from an English-speaker’s perspective. And Keykat the teddy bear is cute.

-Supplementing the above two with Evita’s Korean Sentence Deck and another Hanja vocabulary builder deck on Anki. Not regularly though.

-Just started trying to follow real conversations through Youtube “Learn Korean through drama” type videos. Here’s one good channel with regular updates: FnE Korean. And another one, slightly harder and hasn’t updated in 2 years: Listen to Siri.

SO! After 80 lessons (out of 267), how good is my Korean? LOOOOOOOL, not that good! How do I tell? Well, it’s totally subjective, but my current goal in learning Korean is being able to read all the fun, beautifully-colored wish fulfillment manhwa they pump out, in the raw. A lot of it is scanlated up to date, but a few of them are way behind.

For example “This Girl is a little Wild” is scanlated up to chapter 37 as of writing, but is up to chapter 50 in the raws. “Sincerely: I Became a Duke’s Maid” is up to chapter 13 as of October 24, 2019, but up to 32 raw. And so on, and so forth. Also I’m greedy and would like to read things as soon as they come out. And there are so titles that have been abandoned/not discovered yet.

What about K-drama? I haven’t started one in a while. I would like to eventually be able to understand those, but the chances of a drama being good enough for me to like and yet not actively subtitled is almost non-existent, so I’m not worried about that. Besides, finding a good, non-cheesy, non-overwrought drama is a pain, so I wouldn’t learn Korean just for that.

This means “You’re noisy” or “You’re making noise.”

Back to the main point: since my goal is to read manhwa raw, the easier I find it to read manhwa, the better I can determine I am getting. Manhwa is good because the images help a lot with context, but you still need to understand the text in the end. Based on my recent attempts in the past week, I can say this:

  • I’ve definitely made a lot of progress. Thanks to my knowledge of vocabulary, I can usually figure out the subject and topic of most dialogue so I have some idea what each chapter about. It was even easier when I made a home-made Korean keyboard (lots of masking tape was involved) so I could easily google unfamiliar vocabulary.
  • I still need to work on grammar. Vocabulary helps you understand that the sentence involves “dog” and “eat” but if you don’t understand the verb conjugation, you don’t know if the dog was eaten, the dog ate, will eat, will be eaten with much delight, etc.
  • I need to learn “ban mal” i.e. casual Korean speech and verb endings, and fast. For real life conversations you’ll want to be as polite as possible, but in dramas, books, manhwa, there’s a lot of casual and abbreviated speech that most structured courses won’t prepare you for.

My next goals for learning Korean are thus as stated above. Learn more vocabulary, learn a ton more grammar and get familiar with casual forms as quickly as possible. So I would say that Talk to me in Korean does help a lot, but there’s so much grammar out there and they’ve only covered a fraction in 80 lessons, so if you focus on that exclusively, you won’t get far. Definitely supplement from other sources, especially when it comes to vocab.

That said, I’m not in any hurry and I like my current mix of teachers, so I’ll stick with them. Staying the course I’m currently on is the best plan because they’re all easy to understand. A steady, gradual pace and lots of input from a variety of sources is good enough for now. In a couple of months, I’d like to take a past TOPIK exam and see how well I do on that, but for now I’m going to stay the course.

Finished Lingodeer Korean. I learned nothing!

I mentioned aaaages ago that I was learning Korean on and off with Talk to me in Korean. Yeahhh, that didn’t go so well. I got bored around level 2 and stopped doing it. Yah… We’ll talk about that some other time. I’m still trying to get back in the saddle with that. Thanks to Memrise my retention of the little I learned is extremely good so it’s worth pursuing but…. it’s boring… Anyway, it’s a topic for another day.

After quitting-ish TTMIK I heard about both Duolingo Korean and Lingodeer. I don’t have a good experience with Duolingo for other languages, but Lingodeer got great reviews from people who tried it so I thought I would give it a go. The best part is that you can download the whole course and use it offline for free, which you can’t do with Duolingo or Memrise without paying. This came in super handy because I can learn new things while I’m on the go or waiting in the doctor’s office and stuff.

That’s the main good point about Lingodeer. I guess the other good thing is that the deer mascot is cute <3. They should sell plushies.

So I did do the whole 100% of the Lingodeer Korean course. I said “I learned nothing!” in the topic title, but it’s more accurate to say “I retained nothing!” I know in my head that I learned a lot of different grammar points and some new vocabulary, but I don’t remember most of them.

This isn’t all Lingodeer’s fault. They introduce concepts gradually and clearly and I didn’t have a hard time learning those things in the first place. But their revision system is extremely weak and boring – and completely optional too, so the info is all in one year and out another. You learn something once, revise it once and then you don’t see it again.

What they could have done is to include the revision as a mandatory part of the program. You don’t pass regular reviews, you don’t go on to the next section. Furthermore, they could have done a better job of integrating past grammar points into future sentences. Sentences should have gotten longer and more complex with time.

Anyway, the TL;DR is that Lingodeer teaches a lot of new stuff and is easy to follow so it’s a good start for low-intermediate learners. But you might want to jot things down in a notebook or a flashcard system like Anki so what you learn might actually stick. For me I think I was better off with TTMIK and Memrise and really should push myself to get back into that. If I ever do… before the apocalypse, I will tell you guys about it.

Oh yeah, I did all this Lingodeer stuff around the end of 2017 – beginning of 2018. Recently I opened the app again and noticed they had added video lessons and speaking practice. That’s a great idea, but TBH it sounds like work so I don’t know if I will go through all that. If I do… before the end of the world… I will write a followup post to this one. ¡Adiós!

200 pounds beauty (Korean movie) review, contains ending spoilers

It’s been almost 3 months since I started working on Talk to Me in Korean! Remember? So how am I doing? You’ll have to wait till the 20th to find out! In the meantime it doesn’t do to just study in a vacuum so I’ve been watching a few dramas and TV programs here and there to keep my hand in. All subtitled, of course, at least for now.

200 Pounds Beauty (미녀는 괴로워) is a Korean comedy/romance movie about an overweight woman named Hanna with a beautiful voice who is the real voice behind a K-Pop superstar. When she overhears her crush and manager making fun of her at a party, she goes underground, gets a ton of plastic surgery and reemerges as “Jenny”, ready to take the music world by storm!

…We wish. The movie I would have liked to watch is one where Hanna reinvents herself either so she can start a new life away from those who insulted and put her down or so she can get revenge on them. This movie features neither. Hanna just gets surgery because she doesn’t want to be ugly any more (although despite a hideously fake fat suit and bad teeth she was actually rather cute).

She doesn’t have any drive or motivation or purpose so she just walks right back into the same situation she walked out of. Instead of confronting the people who belittled her, she tries her hardest to please them. Instead of boldly being herself as Hanna, she comes up with a lame background story as Jenny – the only thing lamer than her cover story is the brains of the music industry people who never bothered to check it.

What is he looking at down there?

But 200 Pounds Beauty isn’t a story you watch for its cleverness. I at least was watching to see whether Hanna would ever get together with her crush Sang-Jun. Yes, the same crush whose cruel insults drove her to desperation. That guy. Does she? …Probably? It’s left ambiguous at the end. What’s also ambiguous is how Sang-Jun really felt about Hanna all along. There were strong hints that he actually liked her, overweight and all, and only put her down to please his protege (the lip syncer Hanna was really singing for). Now that Hanna = Jenny, the viewer will never know for sure whether Sang-Jun liked her for who he was, or just liked her voice, or if he’s now only attracted to the beautiful Jenny.

On Hanna’s part she doesn’t seem to have forgiven him for his cruelty to Hanna, and while she still seems to like him, it’s clear that something has cooled in their relationship. Plus as a successful singer in her own right now, she has far more options and a far busier schedule to deal with than just being Mrs. Sang-Jun. Whether they will end up together at some point or not is left up to your imagination. I like to hope they won’t. He doesn’t deserve her and she has a lot of issues to work out any way.

As for the message of the film concerning plastic surgery, what the characters say and what the movie actually promotes are two different things. Hanna/Jenny eventually gives a tearful speech about how she thought surgery would make her life better but it didn’t… except it totally did. Before she was broke, fat, made fun of, lonely, afterwards she is beautiful, slim, dressed in the latest and hottest fashion with thousands of adoring insta-fans, a growing music career and a very handsome not-quite-boyfriend. It’s clear she got all this by completely changing her image.

In the end the main character spends 5 minutes saying “Plastic surgery won’t solve your problems” while the movie spends 90 minutes saying the opposite. Who are we supposed to believe? You can draw your own conclusions, but it’s telling that even after Hanna’s heartfelt “confession,” the movie closes with her best friend sitting in front of Hanna’s plastic surgeon (now rich and famous) and begging for a procedure as well. As I said, draw your own conclusions but the meaning is obvious.

Despite the wackness of the message and the fruitlessness of the romance, I did quite enjoy 200 Pounds Beauty. I’m not quite sure why, but I suppose it had some charm to it. Rags to riches plots are a timeless classic for a reason and I wanted to see how things would work out between Hanna and pretty boy. If you’re not the type to take movies too seriously and you don’t have body image issues, it’s worth a watch. Preferably with a buddy so you can roll your eyes together when things get a bit ridiculous.