O! The Drama of it All

Who doesn’t love a drama? They’re just fun.

Koreans TV dramas can be fun, too. But if you’re like a lot of the English speaking crowd here, you don’t understand Korean near well enough to warrant sitting down to watch any of them.  They’re not fun at all.

I used to think it would be nice to be able watch some of them as I channel-surfed my way through many evenings. Especially on cold nights such as its been lately when going outside is the last thing on my mind. In between the few English channels playing “The Mummy” for the 33rd time and maybe the Discovery channel I could always count on flipping past scads of sappy soap opera dramas, costume-rich historical dramas or even Korean movies. All of which were sadly out of reach due to my poor Korean skills.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.  If you’re willing to wait a few days past the initial network broadcast, the video will be uploaded,  a subtitle track created and it will all be neatly packaged in website built just for people like you and I.

Mysoju.com is a website specializing in conglomerating the various video clips of TV series and movies with the corresponding subtitle files for Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese and Chinese movies and dramas. They say it’s legal because they don’t host anything – just link to it.  True enough. Click your way through to a specific show and you’ll be redirected to another site – dailymotion.com, yahoo or something else – but you’ll get the proper video and good English subtitles to go with it.   Thanks to Korea’s rockin’ internet connections, watching high quality video over the internet is no big deal.  I’ve found that some videos aren’t all there, but there’s an easy reporting system problems that seems to be listened to. But there are no subscriptions, no fees. Just drama. O! The drama of it all

Now you can converse intelligently around the water cooler with your Korean co-workers about the latest evening dramas.

Next up: how to watch an English-language TV show or movie with Korean subtitles (my Korean wife is a big fan of this.)

p.s. I’m a Chuno fan. What’s your favorite K drama?