Lost: OMGWTF POLAR BEAR
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Heh -- maybe Jin just hasn't had the opportunity to use "courtesy patrol" in a conversation.
The only English-language television I watched there was available through AFN (Armed Forces Network), which you can only get if you're living on the military base. American television programs on Korean channels are largely dubbed. Movies are generally released in English for a couple of weeks in very limited release, and then go wide dubbed into Korean. It would certainly possible to pick up some English from the media, but English is far less pervasive in Korea than in, say, India.
the way that you don't have to be a baseball fan to say a guy...got caught looking.
Getting "caught looking" is a baseball phrase? I had no idea. I'm not a baseball fan at all but I've been to games and it's been around me, culturally speaking, all my life.
Jars, I think the reason you don't know those phrases is that I don't think they play baseball at all in Ireland. But I bet most Americans recognize those phrases, and a lot of people use them all the time, without thinking of the original context of those phrases as sports terminology.
(Ha! X-post that proves my point!)
Similarly, English-speakers may say things like chibi-Cokes and Jenny-chan, or ciao, or quelle horreur!, or gesundheit, without thinking about it -- but in each case, they're adopting foreign words into their vocabularies. Some people may not do that at all, as in Robin's example, but I bet most people do. To imply that Jin is totally ignorant of English (or that Sun was, before her lessons) is to say that they never heard of, like, Elvis.
My father is a native Russian speaker and his parents preferred to speak it at home, so I heard it all the time growing up. Not only that, I was taught specific phrases (greetings at Easter, that sort of thing). I still managed to never pick any up.
But is that kind of cultural osmosis helpful for conversational speaking? I mean, I've seen enough Chinese movies that there are familiar-sounding words, but I still couldn't ask someone their name, or how to get to the airport. (I could tell them to go fuck themselves, but that's more a side-effect of having a husband and brother-in-law who spent their teenagehoods in Hong Kong.)
Similarly, English-speakers may say things like chibi-Cokes and Jenny-chan, or ciao, or quelle horreur!, or gesundheit, without thinking about it -- but in each case, they're adopting foreign words into their vocabularies.
Ok, but not particularly useful words in this context. The fact that I have a handful of Russian words I can call up to add color to an english sentence would help me communicate not at all if I were stranded on an island with people who spoke only Russian and had absolutely no English.
Hell, I've encountered enough Americans with no useful English that I couldn't assume someone who's actually from a whole different country needs have it.
Nutty, I'm guessing you're facile with languages. You're lucky. Not everyone is, by a long shot.
I've been assuming that in an ambitious country like Korea, children get 8-10 years of English instruction in the schools. If that's not true, then it's possible that Sun had only slight familiarity with English, although it still seems likely that rich daddy would send her to private school so she could reflect his own sophistication when interacting with 'colleagues from Syndney and LA.' Does anyone know about English instruction in Korean schools?
No, of course, not all these words are useful. But like I said, the writers are treating language like an on/off switch. Either you know the language completely, or you don't at all; whereas even a few sessions of "New Coke!" "Hasta la vista baby?" would be realistic.
The proof of it will come next week, if Sun's English is idiomatic and correct, and she never discovers a vocab deficit and lapses back into Korean in the middle of a conversation with an English-only speaker. For that matter, we already have proof: despite some close interactions, and both Sun's and Jin's general usefulness, nobody on the island has learned a single word of Korean.
nobody on the island has learned a single word of Korean.
Walt learned toothbrush or toothpaste (I can't remember which) when Michael went boar-hunting
