안녕하세요, it’s Ari, your friendly Korean source and your weekend reminder🎉 Today’s newsletter is about how to say “BTS concert was great!,” a super popular K-Drama everyone’s talking about and an egg 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.
💜 BTS concert was great!
BTS recently had a 3-day concert in Seoul. It was streamed online and theaters around the world. It was a huge success. I guess many of ARMYs watched the concert. So I prepared how to say “BTS concert was great!” in Korean for today’s mini lesson. It’s,
(방탄 콘서트) 너무 좋았어요! (BTS concert) was great!
You can replace the bracketed word with a movie, drama, or even a date. If you really enjoyed your time with your date today, you can say 오늘 데이트 너무 좋았어요 which is a great way to make your date happy :D
📢 New voicemail where you can send me your Korean voice is coming! Get ready to ‘rap’ your Korean 🎤
👨❤️👨 Girls love ‘Boys’ love’
Semantic Error, a BL K-Drama which ended its first season recently, is super popular🔥 among young Korean women right now. BL is an acronym of ‘Boys’ Love’ which is a genre about gay romance. BL has always been a subculture in the country. But with the popularity of the drama and BL novels & webtoons, it’s becoming a mainstream culture.
Semantic Error is about a romance between a hermit college student whose major is computer science and a social butterfly student whose major is design. On the poster 👆 it says “A heart-pounding error popped up in my perfectly-programmed life.” It’s a typical archenemies-to-lovers romance. The drama is based on the big-hit novel and webtoon of the same title.
Though I didn’t watch the series yet (because it’s exclusive on Watcha, a Korean streaming service which I don’t subscribe to, in overseas, it’s available on Viki), I saw a ton of posts and comments about the series on the Internet. Girls are crazy about kiss scenes in the series and the lead actors. The lead actor who played the social butterfly is Park Seo-ham. He was a member of KNK, a boy K-Pop group. He’s popular for many things including his tall height, 193 cm or 6 ft. 4 in. I saw many girls praising him for being a realization of a typical 공 in BL world. (👩🏫 공 means ‘top’ and 수 means ‘bottom.’ Hope you know what I mean;) Another lead actor who played the hermit is Jae-chan, a member of DONGKIZ, a K-Pop boy group. The ranks of old songs of DONGKIZ are going up on Korean music charts thanks to the popularity of Semantic Error.
South Korea is a very conservative country so I never thought it could be a mainstream culture in which K-Pop idols star. But it’s happening. With the success of Semantic Error, we might be able to see more idols acting in BL dramas in the future. I wonder how K-Pop fans will react to realizations of their fanfictions 🙃 And I hope the popularity of BL dramas can help more people understand and respect homosexuality and LGBT in the country where gay marriage is not legal. It seems like we have a long way to go. Recently, a fan meeting event of To My Star, another hit Korean BL drama got canceled just a few days before the event date. The event venue canceled the event because “it’s not suitable to be held.”
👀 P.S. My BL drama recommendations: I’m not an expert but I somehow watched two good BL dramas.
2gether, a Thai drama, funny and full of good music, available on Netflix
Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?!, a Japanese drama, sentimental and heart-warming
🍳 Dalgyal mari
Dalgyal mari or gyeran mari is one of the most popular home-meal food that Korean moms make for their kids. It’s a rolled omelette with vegetable fillings like chopped green onion and carrot. Since it goes very well with rice, many restaurants offer this food as a side dish. You can customize dalgyal mari with different fillings. For example, my mom usually add chopped spicy pepper to make it spicy. Many Korean bars offer cheese dalgyal mari which has mozzarella cheese in it. It can be a little challenging to roll the omelette on the pan. I failed a lot; But it’s fun to make! Watch the vid ☝ and challenge yourself :D
Before I go…
Join my virtual McDonald’s where you can practice how to order in Korean! This week’s challenge is to customize your burger. It opens on Twitter Space so follow my Twitter to set a reminder and join 👇
⏳ Opening hours: 5:30-6:30 pm Sunday EST
Thanks for reading! If you liked my newsletter, ❤ or share it to make my day :D Leave your 2 cents about this week’s newsletter in comments. See you next week, 안녕 👋
🏃♀️ My second Korean exercise book will drop next week, if everything goes right. Plz look forward to it! My first book, Korean Vocabulary Exercise Book - Pick a side! is available on my online shop (e-book) and Amazon (paperback).
Thank you so much for your dedication, teacher Ari! We appreciate you taking time to write about Korean topics each week and help us learn more. I had heard about Semantic Error through Tiktok lol, I'm excited to watch it and look into your recommendations too! Seoham is also my KNK bias so this will be exciting :)