China Smack and Korea Bang

Since I grew up in Canada, my knowledge of written Chinese is outright shameful. Even though I went to Chinese school every week for 5 years, I am still unable to read and understand Chinese newspapers. That's why I was overjoyed when I found the site China Smack. The site's concept is simple - they take interesting news bytes from Chinese news and social networks, and translate popular comments into English so us English-readers can understand them.

China Smack and Korea Bang, the Korean equivalent of the former, is a valuable window into the views of the 'average' Chinese/Korean internet commenter. Not only do the sites translate comments, they also explain culturally specific sayings and memes.

It seemed to me that these social networks and memes were developing in parallel to the English equivalents. Chinese speakers have their own youtube, their own facebook, and so on. Japanese speakers also have their own very developed, Japanese-specific sites for most things.

 I found it really interesting to see how citizens from different countries act on the internet One thing I noticed with Chinese comments was how sarcastic most of the comments were. Many comments consist of crude humour and speculation of potential funny situations relevant to the article. Most of the comments had a very down-to-earth and skeptical attitude, and if someone got too into a point of view, there will inevitably be another comment ridiculing them for not being 'realistic'. However, compared to english online communities, the comments were rarely very negative and hateful.

Korea Bang is a new spin off inspired by China Smack. Reading the comments, I found a few differences in general attitude compared to the comments in China Smack. Korean 'netizens' were often more serious and stayed more on topic. Posts also averaged out to be a bit longer and many of them were quite informative and had actual figures and facts. Overall, Korean commenter were a lot less light hearted and easily outraged compared to the biting sarcasm of Chinese commenter.

Of course, my observations are only based off translated comments so they are not very accurate. One of my tentative life goals is to learn enough languages to be able to experience more of these different cultures, both online and offline. The Internet is a great resource for understanding foreign cultures, and I fully intend to take advantage of it.