Move over, Hyundai; have a seat, Samsung: South Korea’s biggest export these days is pop culture
Lesson summary
Hi there, thanks for joining us for Plain English lesson number 261. I’m Jeff; JR is the producer. You can find the full lesson at PlainEnglish.com/261.
On today’s lesson, from Parasite to BTS and even baseball, South Korean culture is popular like never before. In the second half of the lesson, we talk about the English expression “spring into action.” There’s a video lesson and all our lesson resources, as always, at PlainEnglish.com/260.
South Korea’s pop culture moment
Allow me to introduce you to the world’s newest cultural powerhouse : South Korea.
Half a century ago, South Korea was a third-world country recovering from a devastating war . Blackouts were common in its cities. There were few exports and no pop culture to speak of . It was poorer than its bizarre communist neighbor to the north. Today, South Korea is a developed country with 51 million people and its brands are dominating pop culture around the world. From the movie Parasite to the band BTS, South Korea’s cultural exports have burst onto the world stage in recent years.
It wasn’t an accident. Some people trace the origins of this cultural boom to 1994 and the Hollywood movie “Jurassic Park”. A South Korean government report found that producing just one hit movie (like “Jurassic Park”) could be worth as much as selling 1.5 million cars. The report concluded that South Korea should be investing more in cultural exports, including blockbuster movies.
The government sprang into action. It relaxed censorship laws and began pouring resources into “soft” exports like pop music, movies, cosmetics , food, and clothing. In South Korea, there is a culture of big, vertically-integrated conglomerate companies: Samsung, the electronics manufacturer , was founded as a grocery store in 1938 and has also made textiles , ships , and chemicals in its history. It is perhaps the biggest example of the “chaebol,” or the big conglomerate companies; others include Daewoo, Hyundai, and LG. These companies have many diversified affiliates under central control .
One side effect of this business culture is the value of coordination among products and brands. That has worked well in the pop-culture renaissance .
Once, big Korean conglomerates came together to produce cars and electronics. They still do, but now the country’s chaebol are applying a similar formula to pop culture. K-pop bands use and endorse popular Korean cosmetics; the two reinforce each other. If a Korean movie studio releases a film, a music label in the same conglomerate can produce an original soundrack; another branch of the company can produce a live-action show to go along with it . An in-house PR agency can promote it all.
The result is a wave of Korean culture sweeping the world . The movie “Parasite” was the first non-English film to win the Oscar for Best Picture and three other Academy Awards. Directed by Bong Joon-Ho, the film was about members of a poor family that all scheme to work for the same rich family by pretending to be unrelated but qualified household servants . Let’s just say the scheme works at first, but it falls apart at the end . It made $266 million on a budget of just $11 million—not bad. The film had an entirely Korean cast and it was the first Korean film ever to be recognized at the Academy Awards. Since then , Netflix has bought the rights to 41 other Korean movies. It’s not just movies; K-Drama includes TV series as well, including the pan-Asian hit “Descendants of the Sun” and the series “Crash Landing on You.” Both are now on Netflix.
K-pop is pop music. The band BTS is the first band since the Beatles to have three number-one Billboard 200 albums in a year. They made a splash with coordinated looks (no doubt enhanced by Korean cosmetics) on the red carpet at the 2020 Grammy’s, where they performed. Other Korean pop bands Blackpink and Twice are also popular globally.
Cosmetics are a big part of South Korea’s cultural exports. The Korean beauty industry targeted detox treatments , cleanses , and other skin-care regiments —all packaged in cute and colorful packaging . The lotions , eye masks , and makeup can be found in high-end department stores like Selfridges and more mainstream chains like Sephora.
K-beauty brands are going beyond the traditional products, too. Mizon, one of the big brands, produces a product that’s 92% snail extract . You put it on your face—I think—and it promises to lighten your complexion and rejuvenate your skin. Besolbo is betting that you’ll like salmon eggs on your face as much as on your sushi. They say their Salmon Egg Sleeping Pack helps with acne and rough skin.
One of the great things about a strong pop culture is that it has a good multiplier effect . It’s a way of introducing a country to the world. The way South Korea sees it , the pop culture won’t be dominant forever. But it will have a “ halo effect ,” where it leaves a positive impression of South Korea in the minds of people everywhere, and that halo effect will carry over to other industries, whether they are in entertainment or not.
South Korea may be benefitting from this halo effect sooner than they imagined. The sports-starved American baseball fans have just one option if they want to see their favorite sport being played live. The Korean Baseball League is now being broadcast in English on ESPN early in the morning in the United States.
Exercises on the new PlainEnglish.com
I don’t think I want to know whose idea it was to put snail extract into a face cream.
Today I’m going to tell you about some new features that are coming to PlainEnglish.com. As you know, we’re re-releasing the web site on June 1. When you log into PlainEnglish.com on June 1, everything will look different. New and improved, as they say.
I’m extremely excited to introduce some new features that will go along with every single lesson of Plain English. I was looking for ways that you can get more actively involved in what you’re hearing, in what you’re learning as part of Plain English. And we settled on four additional exercises to include with each episode. And here they are.
Number one: you will have the opportunity to record your own voice reading a paragraph from the main lesson. When you’re done, you’ll be able to play your voice back so you can hear what you sound like reading a paragraph. And right there on the same page, you’ll be able to hear me reading the same paragraph. So what you’ll be able to do is compare the way I pronounce words and sentences to the way you pronounce them. This is going to be a great way for you really perfect your own pronunciation, by listening to yourself and then comparing your pronunciation to mine.
Number two: You will play an audio clip from the lesson. And then there is a box for you to type exactly what you hear. You won’t see the transcript. You’ll just hear a sentence. Your job is to type every word exactly as you hear it. Then you’ll be able to check what you wrote against what I actually said. This is going to be perfect for everyone who listens and gets like 90 percent or even 95 percent of the content. This is going to test you. And this is going to show you how many of those tiny little words you’re actually catching and how many slip by you. There will be two clips like this in each lesson.
Number three: fill in the blanks. Two things that are really tough to get right in a new language are verb tenses and prepositions. So what we’re going to do is take a paragraph from the lesson and I’m going to delete a bunch of words. It’s your job to fill in the blanks with either the correct preposition or the correct verb tense. Of course, you’ll be able to press submit and see how many you got right.
And number four will be a lesson quiz, a five-question quiz to check your understanding of the main lesson and the expression.
As I mentioned earlier, I was really looking for ways to make our lessons more active for you. It’s one thing to listen, but it’s another thing to get involved yourself. And each of these four exercises will help you get actively involved in the material. The exercises aren’t hard—the quiz questions especially aren’t very difficult—but they’re getting you in the mindset of thinking in English, of making decisions, of producing something yourself. And I think is going to be a big improvement your Plain English experience.
I mentioned in Lesson 250 that it was a big day for us at Plain English, but I couldn’t tell you why. So here’s why: that was the first lesson where we did everything completely new on the new web site, including these new exercises. And so we will have these exercises for all lessons starting at Lesson 250.
(Note: You’re on the new web site. Welcome!)
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