I've liked a lot of projects that Jung Yumi has been in, but the one I can't forget is Que Sera Sera, her first TV drama. It's possibly one of the most horrifying and hard-to-stomach (i.e. amazing) melodramas I've ever seen. I've seen it 2.5 times myself and the opening song still always gives me goosebumps. That said, I [...]
I guess this is a slump
I've been feeling very "damned if you do, damned if you don't" when it comes to studying Korean these days. When I don't have time to study a language, I feel bad because I truly love it and want to do it regularly. That is not what's happening now; for the past couple months, I've actually [...]
Throwback to my K-pop listening days
Confession time. I tend to get defensive when people ask me if I'm learning Korean because of K-pop. That's because 1) K-pop was never a motivation for me to learn the language; it was a side-effect, and the better I got at Korean, the less I started to like idol music anyway. And 2) the [...]
Thoughts on literary writing in another language
Last month, I told my Korean teacher about staying up really late to finish an assignment for an online YA fantasy writing course I was taking, and she semi-jokingly suggested that I should try writing a novel in Korean. Now, I don't think this is something I'll ever do or even be interested in doing -- [...]
Thoughts on non-Koreans adopting Korean names
This is a topic that's made me scratch my head for a while now and I'm not entirely sure about it. Over the years, I've come across many non-Korean-heritage learners who have adopted a Korean name and introduce themselves in class and to their native Korean friends using that name. Usually it's a Korean-sounding name [...]
2018 language goals
In all honesty, I never liked setting personal goals because why bother when there's good chance that I'll just fail and make myself feel bad? There are a few different things wrong with that attitude, yes, but one major reason for it is that my goals were always either 1) grossly unrealistic or 2) not [...]
Interview with Gong Yoo (Elle Korea 2018)
Gong Yoo is one of those actors who consistently takes me by surprise and I'm not really sure why. He's good and he picks pretty solid projects. I've seen (ahem!) five of his dramas and three of his films over the years and every single time I've found something beautiful and moving in his performance. I'll [...]
One Million Roses
My heart feels sliced in half today. I have been removed from the idol scene for a few years now, but there was a time in college and graduate school when SHINee's music meant a lot to me. I bonded with two of my closest friends over their music; no matter how far-removed we were [...]
That poem in ‘Because This Is My First Life’
There are a lot of reasons I loved Because This Is My First Life. Like, a lot. One of them is Jiho's penchant for making literary allusions and using extended metaphors to express her complicated thoughts and feelings. This was a nice bit of character development, I thought; even though Jiho doesn't work as a [...]
Interview with Lee Min-ki and Jung So-min (Marie Claire 2017)
So 이번 생은 처음이라 / Because This Is My First Life wraps up this week. This interview came out in October, right before the show started airing so it's kinda old news at this point, but I needed something to occupy me between episodes and it's been ages since I've translated celebrity news anyway, so here [...]
