What is this thread all about?
Just a place for general discussion. A place to unload whats on your mind and talk about anything - personal, health, help needed, achievements, daily highs and daily lows, theories, predictions and what have you.
Does not need to be Q related.
I really wish you could get on board with chapchae. Really, really top class food, kind of sweet and savory and really yummy. Plus, and this is where you come in, its one of those Korean foods that is NOT spicy (there aren't that many, really)
When I first landed in South Korea, I felt like I'd come home. I discovered spicy food in my teens, and I was able to completely embrace Korean spiciness straight off.
Yuk Gae Jang was my go-to favorite for the first few years. When Korean peeps asked me "what is your favorite (Korean) food?" - a ubiquitous question probably asked of every foreigner every time they make a new Korean friend in Korea - and I stated yukgae jang, they would go "wow! Isn't it spicy?". Me, I'm like, well, yeah, that's the whole point!
The buldak was pretty good but not super brilliant. Will be better the next time.
Currently, one of my lads is having some stomach troubles, so I'm having to adjust and curb my predilections towards the spicier and richer dishes.
Other food I've become adept at is a bunch of Italian dishes, also stews (Irish-ish), and I'm working on refining my mushroom garlic sauces.
Conclusion: So yeah! I saw this. Thanks for the note!
be well, RT.
Wooooooaaaaahhhh...
You've been using fine powder chilli powder for kimchi. Ay, caramba! Or as a Korean would say: Ah-i-go! (exactly how well you manipulate your aigoes will define in the minds of Koreans how well you actually speak the language!)
This is the one you need to be using: (https://i.etsystatic.com/7169689/r/il/080bee/2272618890/il_570xN.2272618890_rgn6.jpg)
hehehe.
Anyway, otherwise, it sounds like you are on your way! If you can make friends with a Korean ajuma and ask if you can watch or be with her when she makes kimchi, you will soar!!!
Categorically uber-correct statement.
it's like the gold mine at the heart of Koreanisms. But, here's the kicker. Korean is chock-full of this sort of thing. Utterly packed. The whole language is basically like this, and aigooo is simply a microcosm!
You cannot translate it literally, as it's primarily purely expressive. There is no referent. You cannot point to something, literally or figuratively, and say that's an aigoo. Maybe english "hey!" is a similar type of word, although the meaning is completely different.
왜
I never got into watching Korean dramas. Rather, I lived a Korean drama, or a "wei-guk-in in Korea" drama. But I can immediately mentally come up with about 10 different ways to say (inflect) 왜 . Now I'm kinda curious as to how the dramas do it. But remember, They be dramas. Soaps. So I'm pretty sure everything is melodramitized and well, dramatized.
왜 그래? is a nice variation. ku-rae is the short, highly familiar version (ie..e banmal) - more polite would be weh ku-rae-yo, or we ku-ro-ssumnika? etc.
It's like, why (are you being like that)? such as "what the heck are you doing???!?!, Why do you have to be so (mean/annoying/fooling around/etc/etc) ?
the verb stem is ku-roh-da (그렇다),, meaning "(something) to be that way....". The 렇 is inflected to become 래.
You know about banmal, right? 반말 (半말) literally "half speech" or "half talk". Sometimes referred to as "informal speech" but its really used only when speaking down to little kids or people significantly younger than you and/or in a position below your social rank. So, if you use it in the wrong way, it's like swearing. And this will be done deliberately in order to piss off the other person and pick a fight, for example.
Used in the right way, it will create a sense of closeness and familiarity.
So weh-kurae will be something the dramas will use only between family members or close buddies or close boy-girl things.
In case you were wondering....
(Kek. This is like walking down memory lane. I don't use Korean much at all these days, except when I visit my local Korean grocery, and even then, I used to be hesitant because a whitey like me using really fluent Korean tends to draw stares..... Never in a bad way, but you feel like you stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.
lol. They really only come naturally to Koreans, unless you grow up there or are young enough to absorb it all, which I believe I was predisposed to. As I wrote before, landing in Korea was like coming home for me, in many many ways.
I think I became Korean before I ever fully became Australian. kek.
This is how you know you're eating good Korean food!
You should walk away like you've just done a 30-minute sprint, with perspiration dripping and yes, nose sniffing.
Koreans love eating like this; makes them feel alive. Me too! Although in the last 10 years, my palate took a serious downturn, and I could not tolerate a lot of spices or heat. But recently as I've been making kimchi (which always means a good kimchi jiggae towards the end or during the life of the kimchi), I seem to have made a comeback.
tang vs jiggae - In the same way that Korean hangeul and Korean sounds don't really correspond to our English consonant and vowel letters, our words like stew, soup, etc don't quite correspond to tang or jiggae either; they are different beasts, sharing similarities but also with differences.
Linguistically, a tang is more like a soup, generally. Tang is a sino-Korean character (湯) which means "to boil water". It's also used for ontang - a hot bath or hot spring. jiggae is a native Korean word. gae is a suffix often used to mean thing. ji-da (찌다) is a verb meaning to steam things, or in this case, to cook hotly. So a jiggae is a "hotly cooked (water-based) thingy". kimchi jiggae = hotly cooked kimchi thingy. dwenjang jiggae = hotly cooked dwenjang thingy.
At least, that's the linguistic breakdown, but of course they are now nouns in their own right.
This page seems to have a really good breakdown of these terms. Seems very on target to me; eg. the liquid to solid portions, the broth being the main element of a tang, etc.
https://guide.michelin.com/sg/en/article/features/korean-soups-guk-tang-jjigae-jeongol-sg
I really would have been hard put to articulate the exact differences, but reading these, I'm like. Yep. That's it.
However, as my South Korean life was almost entirely that of a solitary student living in a dormitory or alone in a cha-chwi-bang (자취방), I don't remember ever being introduced to jeongol. jeongol seems to have a lot in common with sukiyaki or shabushabu.
tteobokki at 1 am. <slaps forehead> wow.
I think if you're eating kimchi and tteokbokki, assuming its done right, then you're well on your way.