Learn Korean Vocab with Hot Korean Women: #1

(Update November 9: Turns out that I made a natural but big mistake with the meaning of “내숭을 떨다.” After reading the post (to help me better justify the mistake!) please read the comments where Sam has pointed out my error. And a big note of appreciation to him for taking the time to do so)

Yesterday I read the post “Kim Tae-hee is a nae-soong” at PopSeoul. Not knowing what ”nae-soong,” or “내숭” meant, I watched the ad, and learned that it means ”true colors” Nine seconds before the end of the ad, it says “김태희, 내숭 떨지마,”  or “Kim Tae-hee, don’t show your true colors.” Check it out for yourself:

Now, I’m not only interested in this ad because it has Kim Tae-hee in it…it’s actually quite cheesy, and heartily recommend this ad for studying Korean instead if seeing her is what motivates you the most (hey, works for me). Nor am I interested in analyzing her exaggerated but unfortunately all too realistic “feminine” behavior, at least for many Korean women: I’ve already done that here. No, the reasons are that the ad is available on youtube and so can easily be watched several times in just a few minutes, and it not only has an unambiguous phrase for people to learn but has a ready-made situation to relate the phrase to. Put all those together, and I’m having trouble forgetting the damn thing.

I’m sure I could have read the phrase in a normal textbook and learned it that way instead, but, like I said way back in June, the authors of most Korean study materials seem to think that people learning Korean are simply fascinated with things like Korean dances, making Kimchee, and bears in caves that ate garlic for 100 days…and so no, I probably wouldn’t have retained it if I’d read it in a book like that. Having said all that, Korean books are definitely getting better, especially the 서강한국어 books that I was using in my recent Korean classes, (although I’m talking about the advanced books 5A and 5B, made this year and which have no kimchee in sight, but I can’t speak for the earlier, beginner ones in the series), but they’re not exactly multimedia. Actually, after 7 years here I only just saw the first ever DVD for learning Korean through Korean dramas with a couple of weeks ago, and so naturally bought it in a flash, but unfortunately…it’s crap. I’ll discuss that in another post soon.

So in the meantime, this is a quick convenient lesson. And if you really want to make something of it, buy the Handbook of Korean Vocabulary like I said here, learn from p44 (of my edition) that the ‘내’ in 내숭’ comes from this character above which means ‘inside’ (more info on that specific character available here), and there you’ll see that some other words like 내복/underwear, 국내/domestic, 시내/downtown, and 내용/contents that you probably already know, which you can now link together more easily. Not only will that help you retain the vocab that you already know, but if you come across new words with 내 in them like ‘실내’ for instance, then knowing what the root 내 means will help you better able to guess what it means. In that case of that word, virtually every room in a building is called something-something-실 so you can guess that ‘실’ means room (p. 146), so inside+room must mean…indoors.

Yes I know, I learned of the meaning of 내 years ago and so that was very easy, but its always good to refresh one’s memory…and I didn’t have much to work with in the ad!

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