안녕하세요, it’s Ari, your friendly Korean source and weekend reminder 🎉 Today’s newsletter is about three zombies that are chasing young Koreans, a tongue twister, and a healthy snack recipe. Let’s start!
🎧 You can listen to this newsletter on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or other your favorite podcast platforms.
📕 My Korean exercise book, Not Studying Korean, Just Filling in the Blanks is available on Amazon (paperback) and my online store (digest e-book). Check it out if you want to pick up some basic grammar & vocabulary, test your skills, and support my work! ❤️
🧟♂️ All of Us Are Doomed (2022)
Recently, Netflix announced its teen zombie K-Drama series, All of Us Are Dead season two 🎉☝ The series is about a high school becoming ground zero for a zombie virus outbreak. In the series, there are many scenes that students are chased by zombies at school. And I can’t stop thinking that the scenes are a lot like with the reality of young Koreans right now. They are chased by three zombies: stock, cryptocurrency and mortgage loan.
🧟♂️ Stock & 🧟♂️ Cryptocurrency
Korean economy is getting worse everyday. Gas price is skyrocketing hitting 10-year high and KOSPI (Korean stock market index) is plummeting, 20% down from its record-high in just 6 months. The problem is that there are so many young stock investors in the country who have lost and are losing money right now. According to Korean Securities Depository, 13.84 million people (total population is 51 million) are investing in stocks by December 2021. It was the first year that the number of stock investors surpassed 10 million. It was mainly due to young Koreans who started investing in stocks during recent years when it was the bull market.
A lot of them also became cryptocurrency investors hoping they could be rich in one night. Teenagers, college students, and young workers downloaded investing apps and put their savings into stocks and cryptocurrency. Many of them made some money so they put more money to increase profits.
But now the stock and cryptocurrency prices are plummeting, people are quickly losing money. So many people are sharing how much they lost online. It’s not just about young Koreans. One of my parents’ acquaintances in his 50s lost 350,000 USD from stock investing 😱 I hear these bad news from media, social networks, and my surroundings everyday.
🧟♂️ Mortgage loan
As buying a house as early as 20’s or 30’s boomed in Korea for the past few years, a new term was born. 영끌 is an acronym of 영혼까지 끌어모으다 meaning ‘to take out loan as much as possible (to buy a house)’ Taking out mortgage loan is, of course, the only way for young Koreans to buy a house. The past few years has been the best times to do it with the record-low interest rate. At the same time, it was the worst time to buy a house in Korea since housing prices were record-high. But the hope that housing prices will go up in the future beat the fear of taking out 30-year loans. As a result, a lot of young Koreans are in big debt with rising interest rates and decreasing housing prices. According to a recent report of the Institute of International Finance, South Korea has the biggest household debt to GDP ratio among 37 economies. The ratio is 104.3 and it’s the only country that has more debt than GDP. According to a news article, about 80% of household debt is related with housing (buying or renting) by 2020.
🎤 Mic Drop- Tongue twister
Today’s mic drop line is a Korean tongue twister. There are many tongue twisters and I picked an easy and popular one among them. Practicing this line will help you master pronunciations of ㅇ and ㄴ as final consonants. The line is,
간장 공장 공장장은 강 공장장이고 된장 공장 공장장은 공 공장장이다.
It means, “The soy sauce factory manager is Gang and the soy bean paste factory manager is Gong.” One takeaway from this sentence is that you can learn that, in office or at work, Koreans call their colleagues as ‘last name + position/job.’ In this sentence, 강 (last name) 공장장 (factory manager) and 공 (last name) 공장장 (factory manager). There’s an office romance K-Drama called, 김비서가 왜 그럴까? (What’s wrong with Secretary Kim?) In this title, 김 is a last name and 비서 means ‘secretary.’
Tip. When your position rank is lower than or the same with the counterpart, you should add 님. For example, 강 공장장님 or 김비서님.
Words in the line,
간장 Soy sauce
공장 Factory
된장 Soy bean paste
👄 You can practice speaking the line on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or other your favorite podcast platforms. Don’t forget to send me your voice message 👇 If you send it by 4 pm Wednesday, June 22nd ET, your voice will be on the next podcast episode!
🍪 Gimbugak
Today’s food is a healthy snack! 김부각 or gimbugak is fried gim. (Gim is dried seaweed Koreans love) If you go to a traditional market or a big grocery shop in Korea, you can easily find this food. We enjoy it as a snack and also as a side dish. I found a good & short gimbugak cooking video with ingredients that are easy to find in almost any country. You only need rice paper, gim, oil, and sesame. Wet rice papers and cut them to layer on top of gim. And then cut the seaweed into bite-size pieces to fry. After that, sprinkle some sesame. If I give you a tip, I recommend sprinkling sugar or salt on wet rice paper before frying. Sweet gimbugak will make a great healthy snack (Korean kids love it) and salty gimbugak will be a great side dish to enjoy with rice (I love it 😍) !
Thanks for reading! If you liked my newsletter, ❤, share, or leave a comment. Don’t forget to send me your voice message. My weekly virtual McDonald’s will take a break from this week. But my new project is coming soon! Be prepared to listen and repeat Korean words and sentences :D See you next week! 안녕 👋