The Grand Narrative

My wife has had “morning” sickness all day, much worse than during her first pregnancy, so I’ve been looking after my daughter for most of it, leaving me little time and energy for deep and meaningful posts. Sorry. On top of that, a friend’s inflamed eye has just meant that she has had to suddenly go to hospital rather than meet me for dinner, the fiend, so I’ve decided to relax with some gratuitous shots of Korean women in revealing clothing light posting instead.

Seriously though, I deserve some fun after the monster epic I spent the last week on. It’s also a good excuse to get rid of some links in my favorites folder that I’ve been unable to do anything with, either because they’re just to pictures, or alternatively are to interesting, eminently bloggable articles, but ones about subjects I’ve exhaustively covered already, and don’t feel like returning to at the moment. But my readers may still be interested in those subjects, so I’ll provide those links in the next post. For now though, here are some pictures of Kim Hye-Su/김혜수 and Lee Hyori/이효리 to study Korean with:

These pictures don’t do justice to…er…the originals, more of which you can see here. Why, oh why, is Korea is still described as a “conservative” country by the likes of Lonely Planet and CNN?

As for today’s Korean lesson, all the screenshots are from Mnet, the Korean music channel. number 32 in my part of Busan. It’s a little small, but at the top left they say:

랭킹! 남녀 섹시부위

Which, word for word, means:

Ranking! ManWoman SexyPart.

Your guess is as good as mine. Much more interesting is the Korean writing at the bottom, in what could have been a considerably smaller font I feel:

Still, big enough to see clearly though, the writing I mean, so at least I don’t need to write it out again here. Word for word, it says:

Women’s SexyBeauty as for

Firmly Chest Exposure The Maximum.

No wonder Asian porn sites translation programs sound so strange. Personally I’d translate it more naturally as: “The best part of a woman’s sexiness and beauty is definitely when she exposes her breasts.” I think that’s a bit open to debate myself, as we can’t make an objective judgement until Kim Hye-su and Lee Hyori expose other body parts too…more data points and all. Meanwhile, although readers will be probably be more motivated to study now, I doubt that anyone will have learned too much Korean from the above, so to justify this post’s title I want to concentrate on two parts of two of those words: the “출” in “노출” and the “최” in “최고.”

出

The above is the 한자/hanja, or Chinese character, for “출.” If you don’t know what that means and/or how to memorise Korean vocab this way, click on my “Learning Korean” category and work backwards to number one. Assuming that you have done at some point, then this one has always been one of my favorites: not only is it one of the few ones that actually vaguely looks like the “exit; come out; appear; produce; put forth” that it’s supposed to represent, even in Korea you’ll see it at, well, exits everywhere, let alone in China, Japan, or Taiwan. Here are some words with it in them that you learn pretty quickly if you memorise vocab this way, because the other parts of them derive from other hanja too, some of which I’ve covered in previous posts:

• 출구 - exit
• 출입* - exit/entrance (verb)
• 출국* - leave a country
• 출발* - depart
• 출동* - set off, mobilize
• 외출* - go out
• 출근* - go to work
• 수출* - export
• 출산* - deliver a baby
• 출생* - be born
• 진출* - advance, launch
• 대출* - lend, loan

And so on. And here is the hanja for “최,” which means “the most,” and some sample words:

最

• 최상 - the best
• 최대 - the largest, maximum
• 최소 - the smallest, minimum
• 최하 - the lowest, the most inferior
• 최선 - one’s best
• 최악 - the worst
• 최초 - the very first
• 최후 - the last
• 최신 - the newest
• 최근 - the latest

Finally, I admit that it has nothing to do with learning Korean, but back in September I mentioned that my Korean male colleagues had pictures of Korean women on their laptops at work, and wondered what readers thought of that, considering that it would be completely unacceptable in most mixed-sex Western workplaces. I didn’t know the name of the women on my immediate neighbour’s laptop though, and he didn’t either, but I just happened to come across a picture of her today. Her name is 김준희/Kim Joon-hee, but unfortunately I can’t find anything in English about her, and I really need to work on grammar now rather than surfing the Korean net for biographical information about her. Can any readers help out?

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