Name: We Understood Why Asians Make V-Signs
Uploaded: 2020-03-16T19:53:24.000Z
Duration: 7 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi everyone, my name is Sue, and I am a huge fan of everything Asian!

To-infinitive

I thought it'd be fun to make my profile like that, so I decided to find out more about

One thing I really want to know is what's the big deal with the V sign in photos?

I found a friend from Korea to guide me through all the cool stuff.

The first thing I noticed about Ji-yun's writing is that she uses a lot of wave symbols, I

She never just calls me 'Sue', it's always 'Sue~'.

She adds it to pretty much every sentence.

She explained to me it's supposed to make them kinder!

And when it's added after a name, it shows affection.

It looks like they don't just add it to sentences, but even to emoticons.

Speaking of those old-school smileys, they do them their own way.

When you're trying to read the emoticons the way they are in Europe or the US, you have

Otherwise you won't see how a colon and a closing bracket are a smiley face, right?

In Asia – you have to look at a smiley the way it is.

It makes the guessing game a bit harder, but you can read them easier when you've seen

The most basic one is two carets and an underscore in-between.

You can try playing with it and adding some extra emotions.

I'll use it when I make descriptions for my future photos.

Ji-yun told me a sure way to get many likes on a picture is to cross your thumb and index

First I didn't see what it meant, but then I realized it's the cutest thing ever – a

K-pop helped finger heart take over the world.

They say it started with an actress Kim Hye-soo in 2010, and has been a hit ever since.

When Benedict Cumberbatch went on a promo tour for Doctor Strange in 2016 he tried doing

It turned out to be harder than it looks like.

At 2018 PyeongChang, they even sold official finger heart gloves!

Hmmm, that makes me wonder – what if V-sign also stands for something cute like finger

The more recent finger heart variation is the 'Chuu heart'.

Chuu from Korean girl group Loona started it, and everyone loved it!

You make a circle with both hands and then bite into it like into an imaginary hamburger.

I can tell why it's also called a bite heart.

Maybe it also has to do with some celebrity that started it all?

There are many pictures of Winston Churchill throwing the peace sign.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono also did it for world peace.

But did they really start the V-craziness in Asia?

I found out there are a few theories, and none of them involves Churchill or Lennon.

The first theory says it started in the 1960s with baseball comic Kyojin no Hoshi (Star

They made a TV series out of the manga, and everyone started doing the “V-I-C-T-O-R-Y!”

Another theory says a super popular singer in Japan from The Spiders band, Jun Inoue,

He was in a Konica camera commercial in 1972 and threw the V in there.

This theory is the most wide-spread explanation of the V-sign craze in Japan.

I think it does make sense: in the 1980s cameras were becoming more and more popular.

At the same time, magazines for women and girls were another hit.

Everyone was buying these magazines, and everyone wanted to look as “kawaii” as possible

(that means cute), just like the girls from all those glossy pages.

This is most likely how it spread to Eastern Asia.

The magazine girls made V-signs, real life girls copied them.

It has to do with how it changes your face.

Theory number three is that it began with American figure skater Janet Lynn.

18-year-old Janet was taking part in Sapporo Olympics in Japan in 1972.

She had a lot of fans, both her smile and her skating skills were fantastic, and she’d

just won five U.S. championships in a row.

Everyone was positive she’d win, but oh the fates, she fell doing a spin two minutes

It was obvious she wouldn’t win the gold.

But instead of making a sad or angry face Lynn was smiling like a rock star leaving

And this is how she won a bronze medal and the hearts of thousands of Japanese people.

As she toured the country and signed magazines for her fans with “Peace and love”, she

And this is how it became associated with a “don’t ever give up” and “you can

Of course, no one thinks of all that these days when they put up their index and middle

It’s almost an instinct all around Asia.

I think I can relate to that – I often don’t know what to do with my hands when someone’s

Is it just me who feels awkward this way?

Let me know in the comments if you also struggle or you know exactly what to do when the shutter

Anyway, it’s not just an easy solution for your hands, but also a way to make yourself

When you do it the right way, your face looks smaller and sweeter in pictures.

I asked Ji-yun for insights on how to make it work, and she said the trick was to tilt

the fingers towards the face and tilt the face forward.

You can also try touching your face with your fingers or spreading them on the side of any

Add a wink and a duckface at the same time, and success is guaranteed.

It’s pretty much like a live version of Purikura.

Oh, Purikura are photo machines that are crazy popular in Japan.

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We Understood Why Asians Make V-Signs

instinct

guarantee

experiment

random