Recently I’m very addicted to watching Korean CFs on youtube. Granted, most Korean commercials follow a standard formula: exaggerated moves, jiggly songs etc. But they are an awesome window to a country’s culture and also a good tool for learning Korean.
Most CFs are less than 1 min and probably very little dialogue. Watching CFs can help to train your ear to pick up bits of Korean and also catch the captions on the screen. When I first started learning Korean, I found that I couldn’t catch a lot of the captions on variety shows etc. They simply flashed past before I can take a closer look at them. If your Hangeul reading is weak and you are looking at words in terms of consonants and vowels like ㅅ ㅏ ㄹ ㅏ ㅇ ㅎ ㅐ instead of whole characters, looking at CFs can help improve your reading speed.
CFs probably shed light on a country’s culture more than any textbook can do. They are, after all, made to suit the tastes of Koreans. Here’s a pretty funny one on 소주.
Here’s a series of ads by Olleh (telecom operator) advertising the 4G service. I love it how they use the tagline ‘성질 급한 한국인’, emphasizing on the impatience and 빨리빨리 culture of Korea.
applebee
March 1, 2012
I like this idea… Improving using CF. However,my korean vocab is still low. It will be really good if you list some sentences use in the CF. I’m looking forward for more update^^
Andini
May 21, 2012
Learning Korean with commercials… That’s what I’m doing on my blog