Sang-Hun Choe

Man oh man is this book hard to find. If you have the chance to pick it up, buy it and don't think twice. I have no clue why it is so rare but I know that Amazon is the only major online retailer that I can find it on. Moving on.

This book has much to laugh about. It ties in language, culture, and storytelling. You might read this book cover-to-cover and only take away a few memorable stories. I can guarantee you that some Koreans won;t even know the etymology of some of their own words/phrases but you sure as hell well.

It's endearing, funny, and entertaining. It's not exactly appropriate for language study as many of the proverbs and idioms don't exactly make their way into everyday conversation but the history behind these expressions will make you smile if nothing else.

The authors know what they are talking about and are not afraid to share some quirky information with you. Well done!… (més)

Sanghun Choe has taken the time out from co-authoring "The Bridge at No Gun RI: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War" receiving a special award from the Korean Journalists Association for the report and the book, is working as an AP reporter in Seoul, South Korea, to whip up this steaming HOT delicious bimbap of colloquial dissonance between Korean and American sayings.
I am already hungry for more.

AMERICANS SAY: Once on shore, you pray no more.
KOREANS SAY: The person you are when you go to the toilet is completely different from the person you are when you walk out of the toilet.

WE CALL IT: A useless gesture
KOREA CALLS IT: Touching the balls of a dead boy

BUY BORROW or BURN?
BUY… (més)

What a ease. Ostensibly a book about Korean idioms and slang, How Koreans Talk falls far, far short of similar offerings in the Japanese language field. For one thing, the first five editions of the book failed to even include Hangeul for the listed sayings; luckily I held off purchasing until the sixth was published. Even so, only about 10% of the included sayings provide Hangeul; 20% include romanizations sans Hangeul, and the other 70% are only given in English translation, begging the question as to how anyone would be able to recognize said sayings in Korean without ever having encountered them...in Korean. To make matters worse, there's no index, and the English-only expressions are often included under entries far removed from the general categories in which they've been included, resulting, for instance, in expressions involving tigers located in the "Seoul Slang" chapter. (PS: Huh?) Other unforgivable sins include lack of standardisation in the romanized entries...even within a single entry, and a general lack of comprehensibility: "Buddhist monks abandon temples when routine and comforts fray their devotion to the pursuit of enlightenment. Some stick around." End of entry and explanation. (PPS: Huh?) Furthermore, not only does the book not provide quasi-literal translations of the Hangeul entries, it often fails to provide translations at all, or worse yet, substitutes equivalent English idioms, leaving readers bereft of any means of understanding what said expressions are actually saying. It's also interesting to note that the English explanations default into the masculine pronoun unless said explanations are unflattering in nature, in which case the pronoun of choice is "she." I did manage to glean a few interesting trivia tidbits about Korean culture from this book, but that's about all that can be said in its favor.… (més)