Konglish - The Korean Equivalent of Engrish

In terms of pop culture, many countries look to the United States for inspiration. Particularly, Koreans tend to watch American cinema, listen to our pop songs, and use "loan words".

For example, the Korean word for "bus" is "boh-suh" (bus with a Korean accent). They even use words such as "sexy" (but actually pronounced as "sheak-shee") and "coffee" (pronounced "kop-pee"). It's not uncommon to use random English phrases, like how Americans slip Spanish or Italian phrases into their conversations. It's hip and fashionable.

One of the biggest obstacles that English presents to Koreans is the fact that some letters and sounds simply do not exist for them. A typical Korean struggles with the sounds of R, L, F, V. In Korean, these letters don't exist in any form and that's often the explanation for Korean "accents". And often the explanation for Konglish. For example, here we see "Buger King". This is not a translation error, really. The Korean way of pronouncing "Burger King", with its tricky R's, is "Boh-goh King". So "Buger King" makes sense phonetically, but not culturally. As my mother is fond of saying, "Korea: The Land of Almost-Right".