안녕! It’s Ari, your talkative Korean friend and weekend reminder 🎉 Today’s newsletter is about a food to eat with soju, what Korean students are writing, and how to say someone died in Korean in different settings. Let’s start!
🎧 You can listen to me read on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or others.
Gochujang Sulbap For Your Soju Night
There are many soups made with gochujang (red chili paste) or doenjang (soy bean paste). If you’re a K-food lover, you might have tried one or two of them. But I don’t think you have tried today’s food, gochujang sulbap, since it’s not well known. It’s basically a gochjang soup with pork, vegetables, and rice. In Korean, a soup is called 찌개(jjigae) but when you add rice to a soup, it’s called 술밥(sulbap). Sulbap is mostly offered at a fancy grilled meat restaurant in Korea as a side dish. But you can easily make it at home by watching the above cooking video. It’s a perfect food to eat with soju so don’t forget to buy a bottle before cooking!
Prepare soju, I insist! There’s a reason why it’s called sulbap. (Sul means ‘alcohol.’)
Korean Students Are Writing Papers And They Are Not Essays
This winter could be a hard time for many around the world with skyrocketing gas price and inflation. South Korea is no exception, but we have one more thing to suffer: We might spend this cold winter on the streets to impeach our president again. And the signal is coming from papers.
The picture above is a paper put on a board at Chungnam University. The paper is condemning the current president of South Korea, Yoon Seok-yeol, and encouraging to join an upcoming protest saying “Condemn the president who is putting young students in a pit of despair! Join to make a strong wave of candlelight with anger and determination!” The 4-month-old president’s recent approval rating is only 19% and he’s being criticized for corruption scandals, economic policies that favor the rich and many others.
The country has a tradition that university students write words on a big paper (A1) to put on a school board to raise their voice about a political or social issue. The above paper is one of many that are being put on boards in universities across the country. The last time this nation-wide paper writing happened was before President Park Geun-hye was impeached in 2017.
This paper writing culture, or 대자보(daejabo) in Korean, started during 80’s when the country was under dictatorship. At that time, university students were the driving force of the democracy movement. They often held protests fighting against armed police. People who attended an university at the time say, at school, they could always smell tear gas that were used by police against students and schools were full of papers condemning the dictator.
After dictatorship ended, school boards were not crowded anymore until 2016 when President Park Geun-hye’s corruption scandals broke. University students started writing papers again and school boards got crowded again. Even a high school student wrote a paper demanding an investigation about the scandals ☝ After so many papers and after millions of protesters took on the streets for months during cold winter, the president finally got impeached.
Papers in universities have been a signal for big political changes in my country. After students wrote papers, dictatorship fell and the corrupted president got impeached. Now papers are being written and protests demanding the current president’s resignation or impeachment are already starting across the country. It feels so 2016 🙃 But he is as impeachment-proof? as ever with his tight grip on police force and prosecutors. Will Koreans be able to dethrone their president peacefully again? Or not? Either way,
Learn Korean With Ari
The death of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II is all over the news so I prepared a Korean lesson about how to say someone died. Actually, there are so many ways to say it. But I don’t want to scare you with all those words so let me tell you just two words. (Since we often use the past tense when talking about someone’s death, words below are in past tense so they both mean ‘died.’)
죽었다 (casual setting, for everyone)
서거했다 (formal setting, for a leader of a country, religion)
When you talk about the queen’s or anyone’s death between friends, use 1. But if you’re a news anchor reporting the news of her death, don’t use 1. While 1 is used for everyone, 2 is only for a leader of a country or a religion like a president, a queen, or a pope.
Assignment (Level: 🍰)
Imagine you’re a Korean news reporter living in 1450 who is reporting the death of Sejong the Great, a king who created Korean alphabets. How would you write the first sentence of your article? Hint: Fill in the blank 👉 한글의 창시자, 세종대왕이 오늘 ____. “Sejong the Great, a creator of Korean alphabets, died today.”
Submit your assignment via voicemail or comments. Due by 4 pm Wednesday, September 21st ET. Correct answers will be announced & shared on the next podcast episode!
Last thing I want to share is O Yeong-su or player 001 who’s dancing to Leave The Door Open at 2022 Emmy Afterparty after Squid Game won 6 awards 🎉 No doubt he’s from the K-Pop nation! I also really loved the director, Hwang Dong-hyuk’s award acceptance speech ❤
Thanks for reading! And also big thanks for a tip 😘 It helps me a lot to keep writing my newsletter 💪 not to mention makes my day! Have a great weekend! I’ll be back next week. 안녕!