Yesterday, I finished watching Season 3 of Squid Game, a dystopian Korean Netflix drama. I found the latest season thrilling and entertaining, and liked it better than Season 2, although to be fair I felt that all three seasons of the show were amazing and worth watching. As Season 3 is the final one, there will be no more episodes produced for Squid Game per se. However, I hope its producers come up with a prequel or spin-off of the show in the near future.
Speaking of Korean dramas, here in Singapore they are extremely popular, and they constantly appear in the list of 10 most-watched shows on Netflix, often eclipsing American shows featuring major Hollywood actors. Aside from Korean shows, Chinese dramas and Japanese animation series often make it to Netflix’s top-10 list here.
Despite its thriving economy, Singapore hasn’t been particularly successful in getting its entertainment industry off the ground, so Singaporean viewers tend to gravitate toward American, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese productions for their viewing pleasure, rather than Singapore’s own domestic fare.
By the way, until about 20 years ago, Hong Kong used to be an entertainment powerhouse in the Far East, producing countless highly entertaining movies and television shows every year. Singaporean Chinese in their late 40s and above grew up consuming Hong Kong shows on a daily basis, so much so that they can speak or understand Cantonese even if it’s not their mother tongue.
However, with the decline in popularity of Cantonese content in Singapore, younger generations are far less familiar with the dialect as with Mandarin. In my workplace in downtown Singapore, out of a team of around 30 colleagues—a majority of whom are in their 30s and 40s—only one person speaks Cantonese, with English and Mandarin being the two dominant languages in daily communication.
This phenomenon demonstrates the effectiveness of the immersion method in foreign language acquisition, where a learner optimizes their learning outcome by not only learning it as an academic subject, but also using the language to perform daily tasks and enjoy entertainment content, such as books, movies and television shows.
While younger generations of Singaporean Chinese might be less familiar with Cantonese, they might be more familiar with the latest popular terms and expressions in English and Mandarin compared with older generations, thanks to their constant exposure to these languages through streaming services like Netflix and HBO.
By the same token, many people in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland speak English with remarkable fluency, thanks not only to their excellent English teaching programs that begin at a young age for schoolchildren, but also to the wide availability of English content in media—movies and shows—that air with subtitles without dubbing in local languages. They grow up on an overabundance of English influence, practicing the immersion method without even being conscious of it.
Returning to the topic of the rising popularity of Korean shows in Singapore, will it result in young Singaporeans gaining fluency in Korean through the immersion method, the same way Hong Kong shows did to older Singaporeans in enhancing their Cantonese comprehension?
Obviously, the answer is no, since most Singaporeans don’t study Korean in school, and as such have no idea how to read the Korean alphabet (Hangul) or how Korean grammar works, not to mention the meanings of tens of thousands of Korean words. For the immersion method to work, your exposure to native content needs to be backed up by your constant studying of the target language, including pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.
Incidentally, out of sheer curiosity, I recently bought an elementary Korean textbook. I suppose I can combine the studying of the Korean language with the enjoyment of Korean movies and shows. I don’t know how my Korean study will turn out, but I’m determined to take it easy and have fun in the learning process.
