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www.groovekorea.com / April 2014 74 edited by Jenny Na (jenny@groovekorea.com) COMMUnITy chAnneling Ko ReA Professor Oh and company ham it up to make language lessons fun K orean-American Mina Oh quelled the boredom of college life by sifting through an inexhaustible number of cat and music videos on YouTube. She noticed that there weren’t many Kore- an-language videos, so she decided to make a simple lesson teaching the Korean alpha- bet and the video was online in just a couple hours. The architecture undergrad had no idea that the video would eventually rake in more than 1.5 million views. After more early successes like this, Oh is now the mastermind of her own quirky You- Tube channel Sweet And Tasty, which has since attracted more than 140,000 subscrib- ers and hurled her into a career that harnesses her creative nature. “I was so enthusiastic to make the videos that I would sleep less to work on them,” she said over Korean fare at Slobbie restaurant in Hongdae during a recent visit to Seoul. “Even- tually, I decided that architecture wasn’t the most compatible career for me and I started the KWOW (Korean Word of the Week) se- ries.” After the first series caught on, she even- tually added another one called Snack Tub Korea, which has her alter ego Professor Oh reviewing a tub full of Korean snacks. To liven up her videos, Oh kept adding more characters to the cast. There’s also the Kore- an foodie Taekwon Do and his aegyo-licious, K-pop-loving girlfriend B illy Jin; Taekwon Do’s best friend Hyungmin, who owns a Korean BBQ restaurant and nightclub; and Hyung- min’s catty girlfriend Madison, who is always clashing with Billy Jin. “The characters were born out of necessi- ty and limitation,” she said. “The Korean lan- guage contains honorifics and gender-specif- ics. To teach important words and phrases for diverse social situations, I needed a family of actors and actresses. “My real-life Korean grandmother was thou- sands of miles away, so I created my own grandmother: the hip-hoppin’ gangster Gran- ny Kim. Everyone needs a friend, thus another granny was born: Bongja, an addict of every- Story by Sophie Boladeras / Photos by Dylan Goldby chAnneling Ko ReA