안녕하세요, it’s Ari, your friendly Korean source and your weekend reminder🎉 Today’s newsletter is about Myers Briggs types, why you should eat a cake with chopsticks, and a beer time food recipe. Let’s start!
🎧 You can listen to this newsletter and practice speaking Korean sentences on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or other your favorite podcast platforms.
💔 What’s your Myers Briggs type?
Okay… so today, we’re gonna learn how to say “What’s your Myers Briggs type?” and how to answer in Korean. Since Myers Briggs type or MBTI is SUPER popular in Korea, almost every young Korean knows their type and even a company asks for an applicant’s MBTI. Asking someone’s MBTI is very common in the country. So let’s be prepared to ask and answer with me!
엠비티아이 뭐예요? What’s your Myers Briggs type?
(ENFP)예요. (정국)씨는 뭐예요? My type is (ENFP). What’s yours, (Jung-kook)?
👄 Change bracketed words to make a different sentence! Listen & repeat after me with my podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or other podcast platforms.
🥢 Why You Should Eat Cake with Chopsticks
Chopsticks are one of the things Koreans must learn at early age. I remember I started using them at around 5. I felt like an adult when ditching my kids fork for kids chopsticks. We learn how to use them at kindergartens and at home from our parents. Though there’s a standard or right way to use them, many people have their own style of grabbing the sticks. It’s all about finding the most comfortable spots to put your fingers on and your own easiest way to move your fingers to pick up the food.
Chopsticks are a big part of Korean culture. It’s so big that it could even influence our romantic relationships. Many Koreans like men or women who have good chopstick manners or skills which is often using the sticks in the standard way. Conversely, they don’t really like a person who has bad chopstick manners. (A woman is worried about her bad chopstick manners before blind date.) And K-Pop fans often praise idols’ good chopstick manners. Learning how to use chopsticks in the standard way might help you when dating a Korean. But this is not the only reason why I think you should learn to use the sticks.
About a week ago, I got a pizza delivered to my house. It was so big that I couldn’t eat all. So I stored more than half of it in refrigerator. Ever since, I’m having one piece of pizza a day with my chopsticks (and gained some weight 🙃). As I was being very Korean myself, I remembered a gif of a BTS member (probably Jimin) eating a cake with chopsticks ☝
I relate to this gif so much because this is exactly how I eat a cake by myself. I prefer using chopsticks rather than fork for cake along with many other food. It’s not only more comfortable but also I feel the cake tastes more delicious with chopsticks. And I have a theory to explain this. When you try to eat a cake with chopsticks, it gets crushed like the above gif so you get a messy bite-sized piece of cake. The messy piece of cake tastes better than the clean-forked? piece. So learn chopsticks to taste a cake in a better way! You have no choice but to try for yourself to find out if I’m right or not 😋 Let me know how it went after you try.
🍺 Koreans’ beer time friend, Sau-ya
If you watch beer or soju drinking scenes in a K-Drama, you’ll often hear this word, 안주 which refers to food that Koreans eat when drinking alcohol. Today’s food, sau-ya is beer 안주 so many Koreans enjoy this food with beer. Sau-ya (쏘야) is an acronym of sausage yache bokkeum or stir-fried sausage & vegetable. It’s very easy to make. Just stir-fry sausage and vegetables with ketchup-based sauce. And grab a bottle of beer or soda. Then you’re all set! It’ll make your weekend or after-work Netflix time more enjoyable :D Watch a (Eng-subbed) cooking video ☝ and try for yourself!
Before I go…
👄 Join my weekly virtual McDonald’s Instagram live to practice Korean speaking! This week’s challenge is to order at least 2 different menus. It starts at 4:30 pm Sunday EST.
Thanks for reading! If you liked my newsletter, ❤ or share it to make my day :D Leave a question or what you want to know about my country in comments. See you next week, 안녕👋
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