All posts tagged: K-pop

“I remember” – Bang Yong-guk ft Yoseob

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AKA The Song That (temporarily) Brought Me Back To K-Pop. I haven’t cared much about K-pop (not even BIGBANG) since early this year.  In the past couple years, I’ve discovered a whole wonderful slew of indie/rock/hiphop music that I find I enjoy and appreciate much much more than the glitz of K-pop – and so I had all but cleansed myself of idol madness until I stumbled across this song. …AMAZING. And dare I say, this music video rivals my favorite K-pop music video of all time? Okay, so I know I’m late to the party – this song released last year and I think at the time I had heard of the song but never bothered to give it a listen until a couple of days ago.  I do actually still keep an eye out for certain idol groups because, while I’m not into the fandom madness, there’s still a lot of great idol music out there.  So when my friend Holly told me about Yoseob’s solo mini-album, of course I wanted to listen to it (I like Yoseob …

G.O.D – 길

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I really love listening to 유인나의 볼륨을 높여요, not only for the 사연s, but also for the music (go figure).  The nice thing about the podcast version of the show is that you only hear a 10-20 second clip of the song being played – in my opinion, plenty of time to decide whether I like it or not.  That’s how I found out about this song. Okay, so I don’t know much about first-gen K-pop.  I’ve heard of H.O.T, Seo Taiji and Boys, and (recently) 젝스키스 because of 응답하라 1997 (Hakchan is my favorite character, but that’s a whoooole other post).  I knew of G.O.D, but only because of 최고의 사랑 and Yoon Kyesang.  This is my first time actually listening to them and I’ve been looping this song nonstop for the past couple days. Man, the lyrics are so, so relevant to anyone in or around their college years.  I actually read a lot of recent fan comments talking about how they were in elementary school when the song first came out and they …

Learning Korean Through Translation

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I’m a huge proponent of learning a language through translation.  In fact, most of the vocabulary and grammar structures I know now are thanks to my attempts to learn Korean by “translating” K-pop songs.  Not only did I learn new things, I also figured out what the song meant!  But, please note, these are all still amateur translations.  A successful translation captures both the meaning and style of a work and if you use translation as a means to learn a language, you can only hope to master one aspect at the beginner level (meaning).  Once you’ve mastered the language (if there is such a thing), you can learn to capture the style of the original work as well.

Big Bang – 4th Mini Album

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This post isn’t directly related to Korean learning but since other seasoned language learners have said that fangirling plays an important (and necessary) part of foreign language study, I have no qualms about dedicating this entire post to my biggest K-pop bias – Big Bang.  Specifically, Big Bang’s 4th EP, which released a few days ago.  I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited for ANY album release – Korean or otherwise – and let me tell you, the EP is WELL worth all the excitement.