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After years of solo study, I first started taking Korean language classes at Los Angeles\u2019 Korean Cultural Center. While sampling the levels on offer to find one that matched my ability, I noticed a trend. The classes started out huge at the beginner level, thinned out at the intermediate level, and got quite small indeed at the advanced level. That, you\u2019d expect, but the type of people enrolled also changed on the way up: the ranks of the beginner class heaved with students brought there by their love of Korean pop music, or \u201cK-pop\u201d (perhaps you\u2019ve heard of it), while, by the advanced class, they\u2019d almost all fallen away, leaving, for the most part, me and a bunch of Korean-Americans finally interested in communicating with their grandparents.<\/p>\n
Global interest in K-pop rose alongside my own interest in Korea \u2014 a pure coincidence, I can assure you, unless you buy this business about the pan-pop-cultural \u201cKorean wave\u201d supposedly crashing against shore after shore over the past decade or two. But there\u2019s no arguing with all those Big Bang, Super Junior, Girls\u2019 Generation, and 2NE1 enthusiasts packing the Beginner A classrooms: more so than the movies or the television dramas, the country\u2019s disproportionately huge number of subtly different idol singers, girl groups, and boy bands have, for better or for worse, defined for the world what the world has begun to call \u201cKorean cool.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJapanese cool is quirky, the sum of the nation\u2019s eccentricities,\u201dwrites Jeff Yang at CNN<\/a>. \u201cHong Kong cool is frenetic, representative of the society\u2019s freewheeling striving spirit. American cool is casual: It\u2019s cool that\u2019s anchored in doing without trying, it\u2019s about being quintessentially effortless. By contrast, Korean cool could not be more effort-ful,\u201d with its \u201ccandy-colored, otherworldly aesthetic,\u201d its performers \u201cinvariably dancing in perfect sync,\u201d having been \u201crecruited as adolescents and trained for years in groups that are required to live, take classes, eat, sleep and rehearse together until they\u2019ve achieved a transcendent level of harmony.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n