Monday, May 01, 2006

cultural disconnect

Having never seen any of the Scream movies, I was surprised to learn, during a unit on movie genres, that most of my Level 1 students thought "Scream" and its sequels were simply horror films and not horror-comedies. I have no idea whether the horror-comedy genre exists in Korea; more knowledgeable folks should feel free to chime in about what's out there.

Another topic of discussion today was the Korean expression "so-shim," which can occasionally be translated as "small-minded," but is more likely to be used to mean "timidity, cowardice, narrow-mindedness, prudence, circumspection."

The term came up in this circumstance: I was lamenting that none of my students had called me last week about going out for lunch. Before the break, we had planned on doing lunch as a group; because no one had called last week, I joked today that I had become "a sad old man." One student smiled and said, "Small mind!" I understood her to be literally translating "so-shim," and asked her if that's was she was up to. She said yes.

While I'd describe my shtick as "deliberately whiny," I wouldn't have called it "small-minded." This left me at a loss as to how, exactly, the student intended her anglicized "so-shim." Here, too, I'd welcome an explanation from more knowledgeable folks. Keep in mind that she was thinking in Korean and translating literally: "so-shim" comes from the Chinese characters for "small" (so) and "mind" (shim).


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2 comments:

Sean said...

anytime my students bring up the scream movies I tell them it's a comedy but they don't understand why. I then try to explain satire and fail before finally telling them to look up satire in the dictionary and letting them know that the humour is mostly cultural.

Anonymous said...

So-shim han (소심한) essentially means "overly-sensitive".