This is an open question to anyone who lived in the Republic of Korea 2002-2003:

Do you remember when Koreans began using the expression, Thank you anyway, in the same way a person would say, Thank you very much or Thank you kindly?

It's interesting because, as anyone who's lived in the ROK can attest, Koreans tend to think and act the same as all other Koreans, as if there were some kind of collective unconscious at work.  Korean-Koreans (Koreans who live in Korea and are not Kyopos or other Korean-_______s -- they love to begin sentences, "We Koreans..." as if ALL Koreans were in agreement with whatever they were saying.  In most cases, they ARE in agreement -- gotta support the team! Puddy

Flashback to 2002.  I was living in Seoul and my Korean ex, YD from the Culturebook series, she would ask me to do her a favor, and then, after I'd completed the task, when the time came for expression of gratitude, YD would look at me and say, "Thank you anyway!" 

At first, I thought it was strange -- Thank you anyway is what you say to someone who CAN'T help you.  As in: "Sorry, I can't help you."  "Thank you, anyway."  That's the correct usage.  To use Thank you anyway as a form of thank you is very  RUDE.  It's practically a non-sequeter.  YD basically started saying, Thank you anyway, EVERYTIME she thanked somebody.  We broke up soon afterward, so I never learned where she picked up that expression.

In 2002 I left Seoul and by 2003 I was living near Cheongju, working at the Korean National University of Education (KNUE), training high school and middle school English teachers.  My group, group 9, consisisted of 10 teachers ages ranging from 28 to 50ish.  Many were married with children, some were still single -- all were English teachers in public schools.  In any event, some of these TRAINEES, all of whom were proficient in English to some degree, were fond of saying, "Thank you anyway," when a simple thank you would have sufficed.

I finally began looking into the issue and discovered that somewhere (no one knew exactly where it originated, perhaps EBoYoung's English program or some other Korean-based English program) but somebody at the start of the new millennium began teaching the expression, Thank you anyway, as a way of expressing gratitude. 

Objectively, if you don't know English well, it's one more word than thank you, so it COULD very well be a more endearing form of thank you, like  thank you very much, or thank you kindly.  However, as any NES knows, adding the conditional  anyway changes the meaning substantially.

In a sense, teaching thank you anyway as a form of thank you, is a kind of lingo-terrorism, whereby students learn incorrect English and thereby inadvertently respond rudely.  They don't even realize it!  Their eyes light up in gratitude and then they say, "Thank you anyway,"  as if you did nothing!  It's like when Cheech in the movie Up in Smoke teaches Chong that 'Pendejo' means 'my very good friend' and then in the next scene Chong starts yelling out his car window to passing East LA homeboys, "Hey pendejos!"  Pendejo literally means coward in a derogatory sense, but is commonly used as one would use dumbass or moron.

I remember trying to convince my trainees that saying "Thank you anyway" is rude.  They didn 't believe me at first. Instead, they believed that the unknown, original  SOURCE was correct.  The expression's misuse could have originated on a single EBS radio program, and from there became a NEW USEFUL EXPRESSION, albeit wrong, that suddenly ALL Koreans began using, very much like ALL Koreans believing in 'Fan Death', or that 'French people eat monkey brains' or 'Korean babies gestate for 10 months'.  There are many other such 'facts' that all Korean-Koreans believe.

After a few days/weeks of my trainees investigating the matter of Thank you anyway, i.e., inteweb searches or talking to other foreign born NES instructors, they began to realize that I was correct and all trainees stopped using the expression Thank You Anyway to express gratitude.  It actually took a long time for my trainees to finally come around.

People will believe anything if they trust the Source. Gotta support the team!

In conclusion, I know not how many people actually read this blog.  I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, to all those who read my blog reguarly, for all your support and your readership,

"Thank you anyway!"  I mean, "Thank you!" 

dear athens,
i tried to write a poem about you at the request of a friend. all it did was make me realize that i’m not a good enough writer to ever eloquently say what makes you so wonderful. i feel like one of the guidestones is sitting on my chest i miss you so bad, so i thought about all the exquisite fall days i got to have there and felt nostalgic…

like for that day we killed a whole bunch of chickens.

i miss my old friends and the things we used to do together and how it almost never required going to bars.

thank goodness some of those old friends happen to be here, too.

seems like back then, someone always had a stringed instrument on hand.

it feels like it all ended so shortly after i realized what a spectacular time i ws having, and if i ever get to come back and do it again, i will feel like this:

meanwhile, keep the coffee delicious for me

and keep the hunger alive.

I guess some foreigners in Seoul took the official line seriously. They expected something special for the chance to host an international diplomatic spectacle. All my wife could say about the recently concluded G20 summit in Seoul was, that she resented how her taxes went to give foreign journalists free sandwiches when they should have been forced to eat on the local economy. All the koreaphoria set them all up for a downfall.

The ROK is irritatingly mercantilist, and Americans are right to think Korea cheats on trade. So if Koreans actually wanted the G-2o to be a success, how about dialing down the protectionism and currency ‘fine-tuning’ (i.e., sterilization of inflows to favor big exporters like the ship companies)? I am hardly one to defend the US auto industry for making cars that no wants to drive and that wreck the environment, but Ford nails it with this write-up. So the Chosun Ilbo says Korea should be a good global citizen, but that’s not what Korea really cares about in the G-20. In Korea-land, the G-20 is an opportunity to preen, not what it actually is, a global economic coordinating body. In the words of no less than the SK president, the G-20 in Seoul means, “Koreans are great and that the world is now recognizing that fact.” Somehow I doubt that is what Medvedev, Singh, Kirchener, and all the rest had in mind. Sigh.

The Economist offered its own criticism of Seoul’s speculative opportunism. And then, there’s the lucky outcome for a bad trade deal. This is all preface, I might add, to a pro-freer trade perspective.

In a period of immense risk in international trade diplomacy, and fragile recovery within industrial countries from the global financial crisis, it would be immensely dangerous to send a signal that trans-Pacific trade relations are about to bifurcate into fractious camps.

There is of course an alternative. It is the global system that has created the Asian opportunity and will continue to make or break it.

President Obama might well heed the advice of former USTR and now World Bank President, Robert Zoellick, who points out that the 6 per cent growth rate of the world’s developing countries means they will need ‘precisely the kind of high-value goods that generate well-paying jobs’. Doing the Doha deal is the quickest route to these markets. And, as Findlay argues, progress with TPP can, and needs to, be tied to the global system by taking regional liberalisation and reform commitments for multilateralisation through the WTO.

As the US hosts APEC next year, it will be critical to take a grand-slam, forward-looking agenda like this to the table, not go along slavishly and naively with pursuit of an old-fashioned US-style series of FTAs disguised as a grand-sounding Trans Pacific Partnership.

This failed spectacle is just a small reminder, that managed, mercantilist deals are not free trade, actually the worst enemy of it.

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I like how Joseph Nye in this TED Talk frames the “rise” of Asia – including China – as the “return” of Asia.

What he doesn’t note, though, is the easy alignment of mercantilist economic policies and realist international relations theory. It’s interesting to note, too, in what the Wikipedia article lists as the causes for mercantilism, the same emphasis on transition that Nye emphasizes. Particularly, there’s the monetarist cause, when 18th Century Britain exported gold to pay for Chinese goods. “Mercantilism developed at a time when the European economy was in transition. Isolated feudal estates were being replaced by centralized nation-states as the focus of power. Technological changes in shipping and the growth of urban centers led to a rapid increase in international trade.” What seems compelling here is, that mercantilism is a stop-gap measure, not a coherent paradigm, during transitions between hegemonic periods.

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