My wife loves Korean's tear jerkers soap operas. I try to leave her alone when she gets into it.
Do you speak/understand Korean?
Yes, I can speak a little and can read it since it is largely phonetic. They have 25 characters and somewhere around 10 dipthongs. A dipthong in English is th, ng, ow, ou, sh, ch, oi and oy. That's eight dipthongs in English. There are probably more if I could just think of them. Once you learn the 25 characters and their sounds you can read Korean. There are a few exceptions such as the character making the hard 'g' sound when placed at the end of a syllable changes to an 'm' sound. English has more exceptions than Korean. You can see that with a little bit of effort you can pick up Korean without a lot of difficulty.
Korean, like German, has an honorific speech when you're talking to someone older or more important such as a teacher or government official, a doctor, etc.
Polite Koreans, which is most of them, place the right hand, turned up, just above the elbow when either shaking hands or accepting something such as food or drink. Of course they bow like all Asians. They also do not wear shoes in the house. You can either slip off your shoes and wear house slippers or just wear your socks which is what we do. And again like a lot of cultures and all Asians I can think of Koreans practice the Latin "mi casa es tu casa", my house is your house. My wife didn't know dirty words in English and even didn't know them in Korean. She learned some dirty words in English by hearing them repeatedly in her work place. She hated hearing them.
This is how my wife is: We had some workmen trimming some of our larger trees which had limbs dead and hanging after our ice storm. She gave them all cold soft drinks. When Lunch time came she fixed them sandwiches and side dishes. Our neighbors paid for the workmen, $700, she found out and went over to their house and gave them $700 which she thought was excessive but never uttered a word about it. Just like Koreans out neighbors refused the money until she forced it on them. She appreciated their gestures so much that she took them a gallon jar of hot kim chee that they like. We just love neighbors like that. We have a yard care service once a week and we sometimes have our yard service to some work on an older couple's yard who live next door, they are so very nice, offering to drive me anywhere I need to go, knowing I'm disabled. Yep, we love our neighborhood.
Geez, I can drift off on some really long winded subjects when trying to answer a brief question. Well, that's me.
