Tuesday, May 26, 2009

One Monkey Jumping On The Bed

The cleaning of my side of the room is in progress!
Desk area + floor, check!
To be completed sometime next week.
Why?
'Cause I have 2 presentations tomorrow and an Operations Management assignment that will take a long time (due Thursday)... and then I'm going to shop my heart out at Lotte Duty Free in Myeong Dong on Thursday night, pack Friday morn, and then I'm off for Japan until Monday night!

I'm exhausted -- all day, I worked on the marketing presentation report that has to go with the presentation Powerpoint. We're doing our presentation on the marketing phenomena: Noise Marketing. This marketing concept is well known amongst Koreans, but there's absolutely nothing on this topic in ENGLISH. Try looking it up on Google! All you would get are websites related to the literal meaning of "noise". Anyway, so since it was impossible for me to research this topic as all the sites related to Noise Marketing are in Korean, I was unable to do anything. I just found out yesterday that I'm in charge of writing the report, which was fine because my group members said that it only needed to be 5 pages long double spaced. Then, I read the Marketing syllabus this morning and it said "limit of 15 pages" (in Korean speak, that sort of implies at least 10 pages)! Sheesh -- so I had to stretch it and add more info which took much longer than it should have. I'm currently at 9 pages. Did you know you hardly ever need to include bibliographies for essays and reports in your undergrad!?!? Love that.

Actually what drained me was the 4 hours of having to reword my group's English into proper English. It sure tested my knowledge of English! (that's a lot of English...) It seemed as though we went through every second verb and noun they used - I had to get them to explain why they chose that word for that context to fully understand what they're trying to say. Sometimes, they try to be efficient and use one word in English that encompasses so many meanings but it doesn't sound right. Smart, though!
Quite a few Koreans like to use their thesaurus wayyy too often. I can't remember at the moment, but we had some good laughs about the words they chose!

Sometimes, ESL student's English vocabularly knowledge astounds me. They are able to utilize big words that I don't even use. I'm a bit embarassed to say I've never even heard of some of them! At least I'm not alone. Other English speakers have expressed the same feeling. Some native Japanese people are taking some courses in Japanese at KU and some of their local classmates use impressive words even the native Japanese speakers are not familiar with.

Looking at lanterns through a kaleidoscope

Anyway, it was very warm outside today. I ate 3 popsicles and had an iced vanilla latte. I don't know what to wear for the presentations tomorrow. I think it's going to be hot and when it's hot, I don't enjoy wearing pants!

Random fact: the minimum wage of a convenience store worker is approximately 4,500won/hour. That's around $4.25CDN/hour.

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