At some point in my first viewing of Minari, it dawned on me: I hadn’t needed the subtitles. Not really, anyway. There had been moments here and there when they’d come in handy — I don’t think I could have told you the English term for “chicken sexing,” let alone the Korean one — but for the most part, I’d been able to understand the characters intuitively and automatically, no translation needed.
For me, this was a novel experience. Technically, I know Korean. I’ve…