The Hub of Sparkle!

Under the “Awesome Things about Living in Korea” file, Otto Silver, at “I, Foreigner” linked to a helpful, informative video about ordering food to your home in Korea. Takeout Delivery is a wonderfully cheap, and convenient part of living in Korea, and it’s not hard.

Here is the video from Otto, which goes step by step through the process of ordering food, and even tells you what to do with the dishes afterward.

To partake in this wonderful bit of Korean life, here’s all you need to know:
1. Enough Korean to read the restaurant menus they stick on your door or hang on your apartment door handle. (And you have ABSOLUTELY NO EXCUSE for not learning this much Korean, when the Korean lettering system is so easy to learn. Go here. Or go here to do it by video. It’s a bit “Golly gee, this is SOOOO simple!” but it’s well laid out. It doesn’t take very long: King Sejong, the guy who helped design them, said, “These twenty-eight letters are so simple and precise that the wise can master them in one morning and even the fool can learn them in ten days.” So quit your whining, quit procrastinating, and learn them, before we have to get Mr. T to pity you.)

2. The address of your apartment, in Korean. Get your Korean coworker or your boss to help you with this if you’re not sure.
3. The numbers, so you can tell how many of each thing you want.
4. The Korean names of a few foods you like.

Here’s all you need to have:
1. A phone.
2. A flyer from a restaurant.
3. A little cash.
4. An appetite.

This guy uses the phrase “Hangug-eo chogum arayo” “한국어 조금 알아요” which means “I speak a little Korean.”

Next: DB, a commenter on my blog, who lives at Tuesday’s Borrower, and her fiancee, a real Korean, was inspired by my original post about this video, to create a video of their own, giving a full breakdown of what you might hear on the other side of the phone while ordering food.  DB’s not so good at working the video editor, so she sent it to me to edit it up a bit, and I told her I would only do it if I made the video however I wanted…and here’s what I made (see if you can spot the parts I put in).  These two are very funny people, and their video’s adorable, and they’ve also done a very good breakdown of the “ordering food conversation” — first step by step:

(watch it.  They’re quite funny together.):

Next, here’s the full conversation, so you can hear it, from beginning to end.

And here’s the script they used, in case you need to study it (as I said before: learn to read hangeul.  If you can’t even do that, you probably shouldn’t be phoning out for delivery yet.  First things first, dear readers.)    

Kenny : 네 김밥천국입니다.
DB : 네 수고하십니다.
Kenny : 네 말씀하세요.
DB : 여기는 (*&^*%*&(db’s address)&*%^&$) 인데요, 치즈 돈까스 두 개 배달해 주세요.
As they explain, the person on the phone might answer in any of these ways:
Kenny : situation 1 - 네 알겠습니다. (Ye, I got it)
Situation 2.1 (confirming) - 치즈 돈까스 두 개 맞아요? (checking what you order)
Situaton 2.2 – %&^%&&^(DB’s Address)*^*&% 맞아요? (Checking your address)
DB’s Answer - 맞아요. (That’s right)
Situation 3 -네 빨리 가겠습니다. (Ye I will go quickly ?or ?I will ?be there soon)

To these very helpful videos, I want to add two phrases that would also be useful in this situation (and many others):
“Hangug-eo chal moatt-hae-yo” “한국어 잘못 해요” = literally, “Korean well can’t speak” — I don’t speak Korean well.
and
“Cheon-cheon-hee mal-hae-juseyo” “천천히 말해 주세요” = literally, “Slowly speech-make-please” (juseyo actually is the polite form of “give,” so it literally means “give me slow speech please” or paraphrased, “please speak slowly”… I’m not sure if that’s grammatically perfect…but when you’re telling someone you can’t speak a language well, bad grammar might help you get the point across more emphatically, anyway.)

Here’s Mr. Ed, to help you with those two phrases. The pronunciation is Roboseyo-CanucKorean, rather than perfect Seoul Korean, but it’ll get you through.

Have fun ordering your food!

(Postscript:)
Now, this guy and DB both have a kind of funny addresses. I wonder what neighbourhood they’re in: maybe they’re neighbors with this guy.
(Embedding disabled: Hugh Laurie in “A Bit of Fry and Laurie” – a sketch called “Your Name, Sir?” Watch it. It’s really funny.)

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Survival in Korea