English on Viki vs English on other drama websites

Language Discussions
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When I made this topic it was mainly because I was fascinated that English has much more words and expressions than I knew. English is a very wide language and the fact that a lot of words that I saw there that I don’t see on Viki (probably) just made me realize how wide English actually is.

About the expression ‘mounting a horse’, that wasn’t in the subtitle, but the word ‘horse’ was replace with ‘mount’, which made it unfamiliar to me.

You asked me what drama I’m watching, it’s The King’s Doctor aka Horse Docter.
Warning: Don’t eat while watching this drama.

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:grinning: I love discovering new ways to tell something. In books or articles, I always discover a new way to make a sentence or new words and I find their style of writing really beautiful. Such diversity and so many nuances! Yup!

When I read books in my language, I discover new words, too.

If you like reading, you can find books written in English on a topic you like and while reading, you can note down words or expressions you don’t know. I try to do that because I have a bad memory.

Thanks for the explanation and thanks for the title, I have never watched it :slight_smile:

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I just looked it up and it turns out to be restricted in my area. I thought we lived in the same country? :thinking: Or is this one of those KOCOWA shows?

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She said she watched it (or is watching it? I forgot) on another website, that’s how she found that English subtitling style or vocabulary was different than what she’s used to see on Viki (that’s how the topic of comparison between websites was born I guess).

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Ah, now I get it. Thanks. :slight_smile:

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In highschool we had to read books in Dutch (my mothertongue), French, English and German. During my studies I also read books in Swedish and Norwegian. But nowadays only Dutch and English, cause books in other languages are hard to get (Swedish and Norwegian are not available here at all).
Oh, and I have a few bilingual Korean books for language learners.

But anyways, I agree with you that reading is great for your language skills. Not just for learning new words, but also cause it helps you to start thinking in the other language.

Right now I’m reading one in English: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.

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So many languages! It’s a chance!
In college or high school, I’ve never got to learn so many languages! I would have liked to!

Oh yeah, reading and writing are good!

Your book rings a bell. I am sure I have never read it though. Is it about a North Korean that succeeded in leaving NK? I don’t remember…

For the moment, I am reading a piece from here and here:

Screenshot_20200429-031204_Amazon%20Kindle
I’ve discovered this book while watching a vlog from Jenn Im. So far, I have noted down some words for more vocabulary and highlighted some ideas that I found interesting. For the moment, I like the book because it makes me think.

Not a long time ago, I read Greek myths about complexes in French (Phèdre from Racine, Médée from Corneille) = theatre plays with rhymes, lots of metaphors and old words lol. It’s the perfect vocabulary for tragedy, passion and also reasoning. They’re really good at it.

I always find another book to begin, then my mood changes, then I want to read another genre. Too many interesting things and ideas to read or discover.

I was back in Chinese transmigration novel translated in English: the girl is reading a novel then she literally enters the novel that happens in a past era. She can foresee the future thanks to her mobile phone that was brought along with her. She gets acquainted with the male lead who falls in love with her. And so she changes the plot of the novel.

Yes, crazy story. For the vocabulary I think it’s the descriptive ones (the thing we miss in dramas), but the English translation is not done by a native, so there are instances I am thinking: this is not how it should be written for grammar and finally, it is also a good training for reviewing and it makes me look for the grammar point or how to use a word.

I’m waiting for next week’s novel I’ve discovered during this quarantine: a dark fantasy book PG 19 at least in French
This is really good with a demon huntress (she’s the daughter of an angel and a demon) and another demon (like he’s OP with all qualities of demons). It’s a world with the demonic and angelic sides. Both sides have 7 subspecies that are classified according to the 7 deadly sins and the 7 cardinal virtues. (It’s borrowed from religion). Both of them fall in love. Not only a romance, the arc with murders and the identity of the mastermind behind it was good.
The sequel is for next week, so great expectations :slight_smile:

The thing for vocabulary: not much, but for the content. And looking for these 7:7 in English!

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Ah, no, it’s kind of a historical novel about a Korean family in Japan. Well, it starts in Korea, in the time of Japanese occupation. A young Korean woman gets pregnant by a married man and then another man, who happens to live in Japan, offers to marry her and raise her child as his own. So she moves to Japan and starts a life there.

I also had Latin in highschool and there we also learned about Greek myths (even though they didn’t actually teach us Greek, haha).

There have been times in my life that I had 1 book that I was reading in bed, 1 book that I was reading when I was up and 1 book I read in bus or train. Nowadays I read mostly in bed.

Sounds great. :slight_smile:

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38

I just watched a drama on Viki where they used the word conjecture. Normally, it would not get my notice, except that we were discussing the vast amount of words/expressions in English.

A mount used as a noun can be anything you ride, such as a bicycle, or in video games, your mount could be a flying dragon, raptor or a machine.

King’s Doctor: A medical drama set near the end of the Joseon dynasty about Baek Gwanghyeon, a horse doctor who rises to become the royal physician. It’s available on Viki in Canada and does not have international languages, only English.

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The title is wider than what she meant. She meant what you understood, she was talking about the lexicon. So you were right to focus on that, you replied on what she wanted to discuss.
I just took advantage of the title to expand on what in my opinion is the MAIN difference of Viki from other drama websites.

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Ooh I see, did they make a movie?
I will find it hard for me to read it if it’s about the Japanese occupation, a period where they suffered. How is the story for the moment for you?

Me too! But I’ve realized I don’t read with the same eyes many years later. Feelings are not the same anymore, feels like it’s another book or I am another reader xd

:beach_umbrella: almost paaaaradise :drooling_face:
Share some of your book list somewhere!! I would love to discover the books you enjoyed!

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Exactly :slight_smile:

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Ye, that for sure!

I wasn’t even thinking about typos bc that is something you can find at any time and any place :slight_smile:

In general, unless it is done by professional subbers, I prefer watching foreign language shows with English subs. Mainly because English is almost all the time shorter than German (it is easier to watch and look at short 1 syllable long words in a row than trying to read and watch at the screen at same time; French is similar long as German, sometimes even longer so I wonder how they handle reading and watching at once without using pause button :sweat_smile:)

That’s a good point but sadly, different to the Korean dramas here the Chinese dramas don’t get the same treatment, e.g. you mentioned all the special terms like:

Chinese has many special addressings that show the relation between persons and also their status (in general and to each other) but so far in all the Chinese dramas I watched here the English subs are always using this version

but the problem is that because of that the cultural aspects get lost and also causing misunderstandings (sometimes) because in Chinese

is not always the same (they have different words/signs for it, depending e.g. on being blood related or not). In English the Older Brother cuts it down to the ‘yo bro’ mentality of today’s hip hop/rap/gangster style (I watched German TV movies/shows in which all the employees of a music studio within the rap/hip hop scene called each other ‘bro’ and also some gamers/streamers do that but usually within a certain type of community, not in general).

Some other language teams sometimes use the correct Chinese terms, but in general there is rarely a difference if you watch a Chinese drama here or on Netflix (sometimes Netflix keeps special terms that are fully translated into English/other language here…).

So for me it is sad that only Japanese and Korean get a treatment that keeps more cultural aspects alive even after being translated into English.

(I forgot to mention that in my first post.)

Of course it is much more work to keep all (or many) special terms but I think that is (or should be) the main difference between fansubs and general audience subs as you wrote here

One of my international friends said the English that is mainly/mostly used today is called Global English by a French philosopher/linguist and that it is not ‘the English’ native speakers would use in their local areas. (It is an interesting approach, I’d like to know how much differences exist and if it’s just about less words in general or about different word groups that are used).

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Oh it is interesting!
Does your friend remember the name of the guy or his work?

From my personal exp:
In English class, we had books and materials with excerpts from books written by native speakers or articles from BBC news. Typical American songs too like Bob Marley’s songs and poems.

As for teachers, as far as I remember, they were mostly American speakers and British speakers who they lived in America or England for a period of time.

For international exams like the FCE like Cambridge test (thanks Irmar for making me take a look, because I began to do more free FCE quiz LOLOL and sometimes I was like, wtf what to choose??), I saw articles from BBC with holes where you pick the correct word or it’s reading an article and answer questions.

How was it for you and everyone else when you have been taught English?

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I didn’t even know, but apparently yes:

They are suffering a lot indeed. :sob: But I do like the book and the way it’s written. And it was a present from my Korean friend. :slight_smile:

Yeah, for me it’s also ages ago and of course, as we change, we experience books and movies from back then in a totally different way.

Okay, I will. :slight_smile:

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Her name is Barbara Cassin, but I didn’t read something from her by myself so I don’t know in which context she mentioned it (my friend also said that Global English would erase ‘local/native’ English in the long run but I’m not sure if she said this or if it’s the interpretation of my friend).

We never had native foreign language speakers as teacher, that was of course bad for us (but our French teachers were usually more dedicated and spend/lived some time in France so their teaching was much better, besides that French is more similar to German and Latin than English in certain aspects - I’m not talking about the language tribe, I mean other aspects).

Our English teachers used nice Oxford English at grammar school, which was great but ‘whatever’ kind of US American at high school (which was terrible, also the books and topics were not interesting and worse than the books at grammer school with Oxford English). Of course the movies and audio lessons sound also different (I had much trouble to understand the US American stuff). So it was no fun to learn or spend time with it.
Sometimes we read extracts of native authors, mostly from UK but since we learnt US American the wording/words were different… (really bad teaching concept).

And in German class we read TRANSLATED UK books too! As if we don’t have German authors who wrote their novels in German…

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At highschool we were supposed to learn Brittish English, while at the same time most other English influences that reached us (music, movies, etc.) were American or Canadian and occasionally Australian.
In the first few years or so we had to read little English books, adaptions from regular books, made into relatively simple books for language learners. We had to read one each week. In later years we had to read regular English books, originally written in English, but it didn’t matter from which English-speaking country they came. During the oral part of our final exam we had to talk about a whole list of books we read (also for most other languages). Within certain restrictions we got to choose the books on the list ourselves.
Before all that we had had some English lessons in the last class of elementary school, but not much, cause our teacher there didn’t really see the point of it. He actually said he would have preferred us to learn French!
And my elder sister taught me some English when I was really young.
Later, for my Swedish studies, I lived in Finland for a year, and there I communicated in English with the other international students. Some of them were from English-speaking countries (mostly Canada, Ireland and England), but the majority had different mothertongues.
And the last few years I communicated a lot in English online. And I still read English books.

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I’m shocked! All the books we had to read for each language class HAD TO BE originally written in that specific language, including the German books. And there’s choice enough, I would think …

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Yep, it would make more sense when it is as you mentioned.

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My CM is careful that we use Older Brother, Second Uncle, Third Brother, etc. on a Chinese drama. I watched Dreaming Back to the Qing Dynasty and they addressed everyone as Fourth Brother, Seventh Brother, Thirteenth Brother, etc.

I was born in a country which was part of the British Commonwealth so we commonly spoke and spelled the British way. An elevator was a lift; a car trunk was a car boot; tomato sounded like tomahto. After we moved to Canada, I found Canadian English is even different that English in the U.S.A.

Canadians tend to use American vocabulary but British spelling, except for certain -ize words (in which case we use the American spelling). We put a “u” in words like “colour” and “favour”; Americans leave it out. We spell “theatre” and “centre” with an “re” at the end; they spell with an “er”. British English still insists on a c in the word defense. “Eh” is also known as Canadian speech because it denotes politeness, friendliness and inclusivity. “Eh” softens a sentence to involve the listener, asking their opinion on the matter. Grey is the British spelling, so Canadians may well use it. However, grey is considered a variant of gray.

In the U.S., issuing an apology is often framed as an admission of inadequacy, weakness or guilt. Here we say ‘sorry’ as polite courtesy, thus Ontario province had to make a law to literally limit the liabilities of chronic apologizers. British people whom I personally know have a difficult time saying “Sorry”. We say “zed” but Americans say “zee.”

Limits on speech were incorporated in the Canadian criminal code in relation to treason, sedition, blasphemous and defamatory libel, disruption of religious worship, hate propaganda, spreading false news, public mischief, obscenity, indecency and other forms. I believe U.S.A. still has free speech. We Canadians tend to be more circumspect :slight_smile:

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