Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Passions]

So I was having a conversation with a Korean lady about in her mid-40's I'd say.

I met her in the library in Koreatown, Los Angeles.

She was so full of Korean pride and almost displayed a sense of anti-Americanism, if that's not the most ironic thing ever.


One thing that she said was that Korean's have a sense of group harmony and bond, when they talk, they say, "we/our" as in "Our country has...blah blah blah."

But Americans are selfish and self-centered because when they talk, they say, "my" as in "My country has...blah blah blah."


I was so shocked that I couldn't come back with an intelligent counter-argument. What do you say to convince someone like that how absurd their thinking is?

[Satori]

You couldn't come back with a counter argument because what she said was essentially true. It's true that Koreans are a collective based society and that westerners are more individually focused. So she was not wrong. What she did that was offensive though is to then put a value judgement on those two characteristics and implying that Koreans are better people.

So your come back is "There are positive and negatvie aspects of both ways of thinking".

[Hyeon Een]

[rawiri]

I get this again and again, i have a 45 minute commute to work in the morning and catch a ride with my co workers. They constantly harp on to me about how "hard working" koreans are, how much more intelligent koreans are, how much more beautiful korea is than the rest of the world, how korean is a superior language to english ...blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda, how fucking insecure can you be that you have to be constantly talking about how fucking great your god damn country fucking is? Koreans should really stop lying to themselves and see their country for what it is, a country which has only recently clawed it's way out of third world status. I'm all about national pride but national delusion is a diferent matter.

[hellofaniceguy]

[elynnor]

...

[Real Reality]

[Tjames426]

[Ya-ta Boy]

I have another good illustration of the my/our thing. I was in a language exchange and the young woman was puzzled why we say, "I have to catch my bus". It's not YOUR bus, she said, it's the company's bus. My reply was to say I felt strange saying I was going home to 'our' house when I live alone. We had a nice conversation about the differences in language.

[jaganath69]

Enough of your nationalist bluster. Koryo and Kogoryo were not "Korean" in the strictest sense of the word. The language spoken in northern parts in the first millenium of the CE was closer to Japanese than modern Korean. All this rubbish about a greater Korea and Chinese having stolen land is patently false. Koreans form a majority in one small area beyond the Yalu river, the rest of that space being the historic domain of the Manchurian people.

[wylies99]

Koreans think collectively, UNTIL there is money involved- then it's I/Me/Mine time.

[JeJuJitsu]

[Bibbitybop]

Just yell "America!! #UC& Yeah!!" and let the conversation end there.

[ajgeddes]

[Muramasa blade]

You could just say, 'that's nice' in the most bored disinterested way possible. It's hard, to nearly impossible, to have an intelligent conversation with someone who's already made up their mind.

On the other hand, if you really wanted to, you could discuss linguistics. As other posters have pointed out, Korean and English, have different connotations. You could ask her if Koreans share their husbands/wives. According to my language book you're supposed to use 'uri', or our, when referring to your relatives. She's using we/our in the same manner when referring to the country, nation, etc.