Sofie to Korea

Whenever you speak a language you know well, you will usually put a lot of emphasis on certain sentences to make things sound more natural. For example the sentence “I don’t know anything about this” is less strong than “I don’t know anything about this at all“. Other words or phrases in English, which may be used for emphasizing is very, extremely, super, absolutely, over-, etc. I frequently use such words when speaking Korean too such as 진짜, 되게, 엄청, while in written Korean I usually stick to 정말, 아주, 무척 etc. In English, however, I often find myself using the word “super” in a lot of situations, like “I’m super excited”, or “it’s super hard”. Apparently I have been using this word so much that it has been rubbing off on my LP over the past few months. The only problem is that he’s still not completely sure how to use it correctly, and often ends up using it in a context, where it just sounds hilarious.

We were talking yesterday afternoon, and at some time during our conversation I pointed out that it was way past midnight in Seoul and that he’d better go to bed to which he replied “I know! It’s super over late!” We naturally laugh a lot at each other’s mistakes, and in this case I had a very hard time suppressing my spontaneous laughter. I also plead guilty in having sent a text or two to him afterwards using the words “super over late”, but I consider it payback for when he kept sending me messages with a certain Korean mistake I had made sometime in the fall only to tell me some 3 weeks later that it was of course very wrong and that he just kept repeating it to mess with me. In retrospect I’m not sure this mutual teasing is really furthering our learning, but it sure is fun!

Since today’s Friday I thought I’d end this blog post with a little K-pop. This one is a song by EXO that I’ve been listening to lately. It’s called Overdose 중독, and since 중독 means addiction it’s aptly named so listen to it at your own risk.

Risking an overdose of superlatives I wish you all a super over awesome weekend!