In Korea, there is something called an “English Note.” This is your standard notebook with the fat, large lines bisected with the dotted line in the middle to help beginning writers shape their letters. Most, if not all, users of one of the variations of the Latin alphabet used one of these when first learning to write. In Korea, students studying English use them as well.
The thing is that these notebooks, especially the ones designed and marketed towards elementary students, almost without fail have an artsy cover to them – complete with captions and messages written in English.
The funny thing is that 99.9% of these English captions make 100% no sense. In the rare instance where they are grammatically sound, they are still often directly translated from Korean and end up using use impossibly complex graduate-school level vocabulary. Failing that, they either steal something, or just go smack into Crazyland. And again, these are designed for 8, 9, and 10 year-old ESL students. Here are five most excellent examples.
EXHIBIT A: Endless Run-on Sentences!
This notebook actually gets all the way from start to finish without a typo, a remarkable feat in the world of English Notes. Where it fails miserably is in the world of grammar, and more importantly, in making any sense. Its most blatant error is that it is a run-on sentence from hell. Going with where the capital letters are, it actually could be correctly broken into three sentences if the publishers had just gone with a handful of periods. But they didn’t, and instead we’re left with this incredible syntactic abortion.
Looking more closely, one also might wonder exactly what an “indoor complaint” is. Is it an admission of dissatisfaction made within the confines of four walls? Is it an existential internal grievance made by oneself toward oneself? Whatever it is, chalk up libraries as well in the list of things this notebook could do without, as they are admittedly temples of scholastic torture: where young and unwitting academic neophytes are systematically crushed under the weight of large dusty tomes that obliterate any youthful exuberance for life.
Oh right, and querulous. Before you ask, here.
EXHIBIT B: Outright Theft of Real News Articles, with Crappy Attempts to Hide It with Photoshop!
This is is a photo of a real English-language daily published in Seoul, The Korean Herald. And the maker of this Note completely stole it it, doctored it poorly, and made it an image on their book. Here’s the real article from from the Korean Herald published in 2010.
They’ve attempted to hide their thievery in a number of ways including:
- photoshopping a script “e” to make “The Korean Herald” into the “The Korean Heralde,” since everybody knows that writing in Olde English makes you look cultured and intelligent
- changing the date of publication from September 12th, 2010 to September 13, 2011
- taking out the “K” in N.K. and changing it with an “N” (poorly) despite the fact that they left in “North Korea” as the first two opening words of the article
- flipping the whole thing upside-down (this photo has been inverted)
- banking on the fact that nobody other than a native-English speaker with too much free time would figure all this out
EXHIBIT C: Outright Theft of Disney Songs!
Children raised on Disney will recognize this immediately as taken from one of the most famous Disney movies of all time, Cinderella (1950).
What they did here was take the chorus and first verse from “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” take out a few lines, and reshuffle them into two new verses and nobody’s the wiser!
The lines from the original song from the Disney movie are:
A dream is a wish your heart makes/When you’re fast asleep/In dreams you will lose your heartache/Whatever you wish for you keep
Have faith in your dreams and someday/Your rainbow will come smiling through/No matter how your heart is grieving/If you keep on believing/The dream that you wish will come true (via azlyrics)
So to make this Note, you take out the second two lines from the chorus and replace them with the first three lines of the verse. Then to make the second chunk, continue the verse halfway through, and then repeat the last three lines. Boom! English Note Caption!
EXHIBIT D: English Notebooks with not-English on the Covers!
Here we’ve got an English Note that takes its cover from one of the most famous cities in the English-speaking/entire world. Unless you’re a truly lost individual, you know that New York City is in the United States. And even if you are really out of touch with reality and think New York City is an independent state, or a sovereign country unto itself, or even a floating megapolis somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, you probably can gather that English is the primary language spoken there.
Then why, one wonders, is the caption for this notebook in Italian?
For starters, there is a typo in this smattering of this non-English : “plantare” should have an i where this publisher has erroneously put an L in order to make the Italian word piantare meaning “to plant.” No doubt wherever this publisher found this quote, they confused the lowercase i for an lowercase l, and it becomes all that much more excellent when they chose to put this quote in all caps.
Via Google Translate, this is what the caption means:
Daily Monologue: I would like to buy flowers to plant in the garden…what do you recommend?
Not even touching how little sense this would make even if it was in English, being on a cover of a notebook that is New York-themed, the makers of this book probably though: “Meh, it looks like English, I mean, it’s not Korean, Japanese, Chinese, or that weird stuff coming out of Southeast Asia, so it must be English. Print it!”
EXHIBIT E: Cute Animals Trapped in Dinnerware!
I will let this one speak for itself