民� written in Korean is 민족 (or min jok romanized) where the � suffix signifies "group."

WHAT?!!* - Ludwig van Beethoven [*translated from German by Günter Grass]

Thanks.

Xenzu (Sun Tzu?), I'm no expert in Hanja by any measure so I'd let more knowledgeable persons answer that query.

Hi again melody,

There is an expat-oriented publication called "Seoul Selection". I got a free copy of when I ordered some items from this website

http://seoulselection.com/index.html

It's a quality magazine, written in English, it has articles and is sort of like a Time-Out magazine for the Korean scene. You might be interested in getting a subscription. Also, the website seems pretty informative and you might like to check it out.

Ok, then. Here we go:

Re: "unfaithful, violent, traditionalist whoremongerers"

I am Chinese myself but have a lot of Korean friends. A lot of them moved to Canada when they were young, but none of them are whoremongers, violent or unfaithful.

They are usually the sweet, nice, intelligent types or cool, manly types (but still very smart).

In China, if you want to meet tall, goodlooking Chinese men with western values, I'd suggest going to big cities first.

Yeah, I decided to go by experience rather than by word of mouth and statistics. There are so many statistics floating around that say 70% of Korean men are alcoholics or unfaithful or misogynistic, and I just decided yesterday not to let that bother me.

I actually took the time to remember every Korean guy I've ever gotten to know a bit better and noticed that I had probably gotten to know 17 young, college-aged guys altogether so far. Out of those 17, only 2 or 3 seemed like alcoholics to me and roughly a third smoked. None of them expressed anti-woman sentiments or seemed overly traditional to me and only 4 out of 17 told me they had visited a prostitute before for various reasons, though admittedly I didn't ask 2 of the others about that. Some of the others seemed to be pretty disgusted by me even asking that. All were very kind to me and all were interested in me and though they all had bad or weird habits and a personality I couldn't quite understand, most seemed quite Western in morals to me. Most of them also praised me for my interest in languages and for what they perceived to be my intelligence, giving me the feeling that they actually appreciated smart, independent women more than the stereotype says.

So even though I've had overwhelmingly good experiences, I still have this problem that, with Korean people, I'm never quite sure what's going on in their heads. They don't express their feelings as openly as Westerners do and, well, I've yet to get fully used to this and have yet to develop the "Asian sixth sense." I think this is why I get so intimidated by statistics sometimes, because it reminds me how much of a mystery they sometimes seemed to me despite how open and honest some of them were in conversation. But yes, I decided not to let myself be intimidated by anything people write on the internet or by any studies proving that so and so many Korean people are this or that anymore. I seem to attract people I appreciate and this will likely not change once I move there permanently.

There is a word for that. It is called "noon-chi". My parents always say I have no sense of "noon-chi".

From what I've seen/heard, Korea has changed a lot and has become very...'westernised' in a way. more liberal, hence the use of prostitutes and all that drinking culture.