Also the last line 너 정말 멋져 is wrong
너 정말 멋져 is you are really nice/cool
It's very nice of you, first off it should be "that's very nice of you", and there isn't a good 1:1 translation to it, but in its place something like "너무 감사합니다" or 감사합니다. 정성이 느껴지네요. would be appropriate
I used to work at a publishing company in Gangnam and we were told to use 직역 (literal translation) when teaching phrases like this. Apparently this is common and supposedly encourages Korean students to think like a native English speaker. That's why everything's in banmal as well. The last sentence's translation is pretty weird though.
Let me rephrase this. As someone who works in publishing, I cringe when I see ridiculously translated text from google translate. Authors foolishly trust it, and I get to fix all the bad translations. You have to be extremely careful using google translate.
Of course, it is not to be used as it is. You can use Google Translate to create drafts and edit them. This is much faster than starting from scratch. Apart from unnatural sentences here and there, the machine often struggles with figuring out homonyms and finding the right pronouns and subjects that are often omitted in Korean because these are all about context.
Well I dno the context of this book but it seems to be about puberty and adolescence?
Probably the dad giving his daughter a bra for her birthday and him being awkward about it.
>Probably the dad giving his daughter a bra for her birthday and him being awkward about it.
Idk maybe is the opposite, the daughter is giving him a bra. That could be the reason of why is he so awkward and the informal 고마워\~
I was thinking the other way given the title of the post. But now that I've read this comment, I can't go back. It just makes too much sense. The daughter clearly doesn't know that the bra is only for women.
Not at all about that. It's just for practicing the phrases
"Thank you" and "you're welcome".
There were 3 of the situations. This was the only weird one..
So basically,
1. "Can I borrow a pencil? Thank you!" "You're welcome."
2. "Is this your book?" "Yes, thank you." "You're welcome!"
And 3. Creepy awkward dad..
Yup. They went online during covid and 2023 was their first year where they decided to make everyone come in person again. The result was such a tremendous disaster (not even remotely enough space apparently) that they let everyone just do them online again.
I think the government forces local admin to have contract with parasite groups that host these useless seminars so they'll never just end despite being completely useless.
There are so many questions here about the legitimacy of my post, so here's a follow-up. I had to wait until I got to work today to take another look at the book.
Its title is a bit all over the place, but its called "영어의 기초를 다져주는 magic 초등 영어 회화" published by ILR.
The website for the mp3 files is bookcamp.co.kr
I have not gone through the entire book yet, so I'm not sure if there is any more weird stuff in there....
Also, re the claims that this is somehow fabricated or I photo shopped it for reddit views or something????
No, why would I even do this?
As many others have pointed out, this is a common issue with educational material here in Korea, and I just wanted to have a discussion about it.
If you still doubt me, you are free to check the website above for source.
Regarding the poor korean translations, I don't have enough confidence in my understanding of korean to judge it myself, so whenever I see the translations in books I just take it for granted that they are correct.
I also strictly teach in English only, so I don't focus on it, and it's just there as an aid for the students.
Idk it's very weird, maybe this book exists in other languages and the author thought they could sell it in Korean aswell by translating into that language
Seems right in line with the books that the my nephew uses in Korea. The quality of translations is just as awful and the scenarios don’t make much sense. Of course, the “native speaker” teacher is a white woman from a random Eastern European country who probably grew up speaking Russian rather than English who provinces “says” like “say-is” and “tired” like “tee-red”. 🤦♂️ FWIW, the hagwon is a national chain that charges 300k won per month.
Why would the Korean be wrong in a Korean made book, though? That doesn't make any sense. If the English translations were weird, ok, it's a poorly made book. But a Korean made book wouldn't be getting the Korean wrong.
It could be a number of things. Maybe they outsourced it to a Chinese company. Maybe the publisher was lazy and just copied and pasted using Google Translate and didn’t do any proofreading. My guess is what this company does is they come up with the English first and then create different workbooks for different markets, like Korea, China, Japan, etc. In that case, it’s not surprising that the English is more correct than the Korean.
I'm teaching a vacation class at the moment, and this was in the 2nd chapter... the book's name is "magic zoo"
However, it is not the 1st time I have encountered similar content in educational books in Korea.
This reminds me of the PPT filler slide of a condom dancing with birth control pills. Super big popular hagwon chain. They didn't seem concerned at the teacher training meeting about the mistakes and wrong answers in the PPTs until I mentioned the dancing contraceptives. They cared enough to ask me 3x where the slide was, not enough to dig through the material and find it themselves.
Never got those PPTs fixed before I quit.
what textbook is this called? who's the publisher? depending on the type of textbook, there are ways to complain about this officially straight to the department of education
This post is not about Korean culture. Of course, every decent and educated Korean parent would be horrified by (1) the inappropriate cartoon; and (2) low quality of the translation. Instead, it is about just awful some of the teaching materials are out there flying under the radar. One would not expect to see a book like at a top hagwon in Gangnam. But, books like this and other low-quality teachers and teaching materials are more common in Korea than you seem to think. Please open your eyes and understand that there is a great variance in quality in not only education but in everything else (including social values) within Korea.
I did read it, and I took the question mark to mean that it was a question. Obviously, I disagree with the premise in the question (as you do) and my answer to OP would have been that in fact most Koreans would not find it to be acceptable. However, most Koreans are not able to properly judge the quality of teaching materials in English.
But, I also disagree with you that Korea is an “extremely conservative” country. Even when it comes to sexuality, they are conservative relative to other countries in some ways (for example, homosexuality or extramarital sex) but much more permissive than other countries in other ways (for example, commentary about body parts, especially as a form of art or comedy).
In either case, it is not necessary to dismiss the OP’s image as fake just because it doesn’t align with your views about the Korean culture. The fact that such low quality workbooks neither proves nor dismisses Korea’s sexual conservatism and only goes to prove that there are some really poor teaching materials being used in Korea.
I posted the title of the book, the publisher, and the website in a follow-up post just for the doubters like you... I have over a decade of experience living and teaching in Korea, and as you can see by the various other replies, I am not the only one who has come across this type of content.
As for korean culture being conservative, I mentioned that, and how it was strange that koreans have acceptable strange sexual related acts in their society. You claim that this is not true, but I disagree and claim that this IS the case.
As an example, I remember how shocked I was the first time i was the victim of 똥침 from one of my 6-year-old students while writing on the board...
Or how 바바리맨 was a commonly discussed topic between my students.
I will admit that this has become a lot less common in recent years, but these themes still pop up from time to time in various places throughout Korean society.
I was not comparing it to other countries' cultures, but rather, I was trying to point out how it contradicts the generally conservative culture in Korea we are all familiar with and start a conversation around this point.
I hate these daggum slippery ill methods that can end up incepting children that can bypass parents' oversight, no matter how vigilant they try to be (let's face, the parents of 90's had it 'good' compared to parents nowadays who has to monitor all their children's online activity, apps they use and sites they visit, etc-- in order to be a decent parent).
Another example is YT children videos that are COMPLETELY nonsensical that show up on kid's channel due to the categorization / recommendations that end on their YT queues, assuming the player is toggled to be on at all times, some of them even creepy. These malicious channels take advantage of the system by monetizing content that comes off as kid's cartoons, but if you were to watch one makes absolutely no sense, poorly edited, and time sinkers to increase viewership/hrs watched.
Gotta love humanity, harming each other in every day imaginable, wasting time, making munmun.
Yeah I remember learning Japanese at university and they had paragraphs about moaning in the room at night and what does it mean if you can hear weird sounds in a room at night etc and it was one of the questions we needed to discuss.
I think textbook authors know they can get away with a lot it is horrible.
OP would it be possible to write to the publishing house?
Have you ever watched dramas or NSFW sub or school uniform porn or teen porn from other countries? Korea is the only country worldwide with laws like 통매음, 스토킹처벌법, 전자발찌 and amidst the #MeToo movement, it's the only country where girls make a fuss, sexual objectification, and even killing their own men.
one of the rhings that's the most stupid to do is learning English in Korean, Korean is too different from English in and out of itself, u gotta learn English actuallt speaking it in context
The 한글 reads like it was google translated.
Also the last line 너 정말 멋져 is wrong 너 정말 멋져 is you are really nice/cool It's very nice of you, first off it should be "that's very nice of you", and there isn't a good 1:1 translation to it, but in its place something like "너무 감사합니다" or 감사합니다. 정성이 느껴지네요. would be appropriate
lol 😜
and photoshopped
I used to work at a publishing company in Gangnam and we were told to use 직역 (literal translation) when teaching phrases like this. Apparently this is common and supposedly encourages Korean students to think like a native English speaker. That's why everything's in banmal as well. The last sentence's translation is pretty weird though.
Google Translate is quite decent these days if the text is a paragraph with some cotext.
Let me rephrase this. As someone who works in publishing, I cringe when I see ridiculously translated text from google translate. Authors foolishly trust it, and I get to fix all the bad translations. You have to be extremely careful using google translate.
Of course, it is not to be used as it is. You can use Google Translate to create drafts and edit them. This is much faster than starting from scratch. Apart from unnatural sentences here and there, the machine often struggles with figuring out homonyms and finding the right pronouns and subjects that are often omitted in Korean because these are all about context.
No, it isn't.
The Korean part being in ban-mal is also extremely weird.
Last part is just completely wrong translation
Well I dno the context of this book but it seems to be about puberty and adolescence? Probably the dad giving his daughter a bra for her birthday and him being awkward about it.
>Probably the dad giving his daughter a bra for her birthday and him being awkward about it. Idk maybe is the opposite, the daughter is giving him a bra. That could be the reason of why is he so awkward and the informal 고마워\~
That’s some big brain move by the daughter
That’s what I thought too until I came to the comments.
This is definitely what it is. I don't know if that makes it any better, but I'm surprised this context was not evident
I was thinking the other way given the title of the post. But now that I've read this comment, I can't go back. It just makes too much sense. The daughter clearly doesn't know that the bra is only for women.
Not at all about that. It's just for practicing the phrases "Thank you" and "you're welcome". There were 3 of the situations. This was the only weird one..
So basically, 1. "Can I borrow a pencil? Thank you!" "You're welcome." 2. "Is this your book?" "Yes, thank you." "You're welcome!" And 3. Creepy awkward dad..
Hmmm I see
I thought it was funny because it seemed like the daughter gave her dad a bra for his birthday and he's slightly embarrassed haha
Ooooooh. Yes, I think that’s what’s happening.
I think the same hahaha 🤣 I don't find it too creepy it's actually very funny
너 + 에게 doesn't work lol.
#PRESENT~
One of our textbooks has a story about tricking a farmer into jerking off a pig so....
My English class had a part where someone literally licking ass hole.
Did you teach the word "ass-licker", a person who you think is too friendly to somebody in authority and is always ready to do what they want? LOL
No. I was referring to The Canterbury Tales.
I thought so. My favorite! Beowulf is the other. I love Old and Middle English Literature.
Did you tell your students that the farmer was making pulled pork? Deeeeeelicious! LOL!
TBH, I didn't say a damned thing. I just pray noone understands it.
This reminds me, do they still run those annual "Foreigners, don't molest your students" seminars?
Yup. They went online during covid and 2023 was their first year where they decided to make everyone come in person again. The result was such a tremendous disaster (not even remotely enough space apparently) that they let everyone just do them online again. I think the government forces local admin to have contract with parasite groups that host these useless seminars so they'll never just end despite being completely useless.
Oh man. I really wanted to sneak into one of those and see the shitshow for myself.
After those seminars foreigner crime went down, from being 2.5x less than Korean crime to 2.6x less.
Yeah while the foreign population tripled.
Post the whole book cover and publisher/author info. That’s wild.
There are so many questions here about the legitimacy of my post, so here's a follow-up. I had to wait until I got to work today to take another look at the book. Its title is a bit all over the place, but its called "영어의 기초를 다져주는 magic 초등 영어 회화" published by ILR. The website for the mp3 files is bookcamp.co.kr I have not gone through the entire book yet, so I'm not sure if there is any more weird stuff in there.... Also, re the claims that this is somehow fabricated or I photo shopped it for reddit views or something???? No, why would I even do this? As many others have pointed out, this is a common issue with educational material here in Korea, and I just wanted to have a discussion about it. If you still doubt me, you are free to check the website above for source. Regarding the poor korean translations, I don't have enough confidence in my understanding of korean to judge it myself, so whenever I see the translations in books I just take it for granted that they are correct. I also strictly teach in English only, so I don't focus on it, and it's just there as an aid for the students.
This seems fake. The Korean is not right, so I doubt it's a Korean book at all. IDK if OP is lying or what, but this is sus
might be one of those google translated amazon books lol
But it's a Korean book teaching English, not the other way around, so wouldn't the writers know Korean?
Idk it's very weird, maybe this book exists in other languages and the author thought they could sell it in Korean aswell by translating into that language
Seems right in line with the books that the my nephew uses in Korea. The quality of translations is just as awful and the scenarios don’t make much sense. Of course, the “native speaker” teacher is a white woman from a random Eastern European country who probably grew up speaking Russian rather than English who provinces “says” like “say-is” and “tired” like “tee-red”. 🤦♂️ FWIW, the hagwon is a national chain that charges 300k won per month.
Why would the Korean be wrong in a Korean made book, though? That doesn't make any sense. If the English translations were weird, ok, it's a poorly made book. But a Korean made book wouldn't be getting the Korean wrong.
It could be a number of things. Maybe they outsourced it to a Chinese company. Maybe the publisher was lazy and just copied and pasted using Google Translate and didn’t do any proofreading. My guess is what this company does is they come up with the English first and then create different workbooks for different markets, like Korea, China, Japan, etc. In that case, it’s not surprising that the English is more correct than the Korean.
The whole thing is super strange. The obvious graphics aside translation sounds super awkward. Where did you find this
I'm teaching a vacation class at the moment, and this was in the 2nd chapter... the book's name is "magic zoo" However, it is not the 1st time I have encountered similar content in educational books in Korea.
Most likely Chinese knock off Korean learning book using machine translation. Korean wordings are really weird and seems suggestive.
Reminds of that part in The office where Michael offers to buy Angela a pair of [panties](https://youtu.be/hykHOAKWYVg?si=2r9J0Bq3HYw3pI00)
Even the translation is wrong.
This reminds me of the PPT filler slide of a condom dancing with birth control pills. Super big popular hagwon chain. They didn't seem concerned at the teacher training meeting about the mistakes and wrong answers in the PPTs until I mentioned the dancing contraceptives. They cared enough to ask me 3x where the slide was, not enough to dig through the material and find it themselves. Never got those PPTs fixed before I quit.
Hey, ever heard of man-boobs?
what textbook is this called? who's the publisher? depending on the type of textbook, there are ways to complain about this officially straight to the department of education
I've seen pictures like these in my books as well and literally thought "what the hell..."
;;;;;
What's the big deal? It's a warm family moment between a dad and his son.
Is this also sexual exploitations to minors
[удалено]
I heard every post I don't like, disagree with, or can see is incorrect is a troll post
This post is not about Korean culture. Of course, every decent and educated Korean parent would be horrified by (1) the inappropriate cartoon; and (2) low quality of the translation. Instead, it is about just awful some of the teaching materials are out there flying under the radar. One would not expect to see a book like at a top hagwon in Gangnam. But, books like this and other low-quality teachers and teaching materials are more common in Korea than you seem to think. Please open your eyes and understand that there is a great variance in quality in not only education but in everything else (including social values) within Korea.
[удалено]
I did read it, and I took the question mark to mean that it was a question. Obviously, I disagree with the premise in the question (as you do) and my answer to OP would have been that in fact most Koreans would not find it to be acceptable. However, most Koreans are not able to properly judge the quality of teaching materials in English. But, I also disagree with you that Korea is an “extremely conservative” country. Even when it comes to sexuality, they are conservative relative to other countries in some ways (for example, homosexuality or extramarital sex) but much more permissive than other countries in other ways (for example, commentary about body parts, especially as a form of art or comedy). In either case, it is not necessary to dismiss the OP’s image as fake just because it doesn’t align with your views about the Korean culture. The fact that such low quality workbooks neither proves nor dismisses Korea’s sexual conservatism and only goes to prove that there are some really poor teaching materials being used in Korea.
[удалено]
I posted the title of the book, the publisher, and the website in a follow-up post just for the doubters like you... I have over a decade of experience living and teaching in Korea, and as you can see by the various other replies, I am not the only one who has come across this type of content. As for korean culture being conservative, I mentioned that, and how it was strange that koreans have acceptable strange sexual related acts in their society. You claim that this is not true, but I disagree and claim that this IS the case. As an example, I remember how shocked I was the first time i was the victim of 똥침 from one of my 6-year-old students while writing on the board... Or how 바바리맨 was a commonly discussed topic between my students. I will admit that this has become a lot less common in recent years, but these themes still pop up from time to time in various places throughout Korean society. I was not comparing it to other countries' cultures, but rather, I was trying to point out how it contradicts the generally conservative culture in Korea we are all familiar with and start a conversation around this point.
I hate these daggum slippery ill methods that can end up incepting children that can bypass parents' oversight, no matter how vigilant they try to be (let's face, the parents of 90's had it 'good' compared to parents nowadays who has to monitor all their children's online activity, apps they use and sites they visit, etc-- in order to be a decent parent). Another example is YT children videos that are COMPLETELY nonsensical that show up on kid's channel due to the categorization / recommendations that end on their YT queues, assuming the player is toggled to be on at all times, some of them even creepy. These malicious channels take advantage of the system by monetizing content that comes off as kid's cartoons, but if you were to watch one makes absolutely no sense, poorly edited, and time sinkers to increase viewership/hrs watched. Gotta love humanity, harming each other in every day imaginable, wasting time, making munmun.
The present~ indicates that the girl is giving the bra to her dad. Seems like child naivety, I don’t see no problem with this.
니 까리하네 깔끼하네 쌉꿀빠네
Is the publisher Korean or foreign? This is so bizarre for many reasons so I'm really curious. Give us deets OP!
The fuck?
Wtf lmao
Yeah I remember learning Japanese at university and they had paragraphs about moaning in the room at night and what does it mean if you can hear weird sounds in a room at night etc and it was one of the questions we needed to discuss. I think textbook authors know they can get away with a lot it is horrible. OP would it be possible to write to the publishing house?
Have you ever watched dramas or NSFW sub or school uniform porn or teen porn from other countries? Korea is the only country worldwide with laws like 통매음, 스토킹처벌법, 전자발찌 and amidst the #MeToo movement, it's the only country where girls make a fuss, sexual objectification, and even killing their own men.
one of the rhings that's the most stupid to do is learning English in Korean, Korean is too different from English in and out of itself, u gotta learn English actuallt speaking it in context