Language learning journal 250330
This month, I focused on keeping up with the news in Korea while focusing on learning professional vocabulary. As usual, we started our meetings with casual conversations about school life and plans after graduation. I would say it was pretty refreshing since I speak English for most of the academic things so sometimes I forget words in Korea I want to use if I want to talk about them in Korean. One of the words I tried to remember recently was 경비 (expense), which is not a common word but also not too rare to see. It is great that these meetings keep me away from forgetting this kind of words and expressions as I do feel that living in America affects my language skill even though Korean is my mother language.
Also, as I read news articles, I came across unfortunate news that Korea has been experiencing the worst wildfire disaster on record this March. It happened due to several separate wildfire incidents in mostly Gyeongsang-do (경상도, central and southern region of Korea) along with low precipitation and high wind advisory that made them worse. I saw that it is hard to use helicopter to put off fire since there is too much smoke. Even though I am far away from Korea, I happened to hear stories from people close to me that they had to deal with it too. I heard that one of my friends who goes to a school in Andong(안동), a city in Gyeongsangbuk-do that my family also visited last summer, had to evacuate due to the wildfire. Although amid hard times for many people, there are a lot of donations and volunteers going on, for which I hope this gets settled down soon.
Another big issue in Korea is the recent pension reform legislation. In summary, the National Assembly (국회) approved significant reformation to the national pension fund (국민 연금) since it is expected to run out in 2050s due to a growing population of senior citizens. This issue has been discussed for a while and finally the reform legislation was approved. However, there are many controversies around the recent reformation since the goal of the legislation is to keep the fund away from running out and therefore increase the contribution rate, responsibility of which will be imposed mostly on younger generations who have many years left to retire. This clearly shows the demographic challenges that South Korea is facing, which I think will be a great topic to get to know more about for the next month.
This month, I focused on keeping up with the news in Korea while focusing on learning professional vocabulary. As usual, we started our meetings with casual conversations about school life and plans after graduation. I would say it was pretty refreshing since I speak English for most of the academic things so sometimes I forget words in Korea I want to use if I want to talk about them in Korean. One of the words I tried to remember recently was 경비 (expense), which is not a common word but also not too rare to see. It is great that these meetings keep me away from forgetting this kind of words and expressions as I do feel that living in America affects my language skill even though Korean is my mother language.
Also, as I read news articles, I came across unfortunate news that Korea has been experiencing the worst wildfire disaster on record this March. It happened due to several separate wildfire incidents in mostly Gyeongsang-do (경상도, central and southern region of Korea) along with low precipitation and high wind advisory that made them worse. I saw that it is hard to use helicopter to put off fire since there is too much smoke. Even though I am far away from Korea, I happened to hear stories from people close to me that they had to deal with it too. I heard that one of my friends who goes to a school in Andong(안동), a city in Gyeongsangbuk-do that my family also visited last summer, had to evacuate due to the wildfire. Although amid hard times for many people, there are a lot of donations and volunteers going on, for which I hope this gets settled down soon.
Another big issue in Korea is the recent pension reform legislation. In summary, the National Assembly (국회) approved significant reformation to the national pension fund (국민 연금) since it is expected to run out in 2050s due to a growing population of senior citizens. This issue has been discussed for a while and finally the reform legislation was approved. However, there are many controversies around the recent reformation since the goal of the legislation is to keep the fund away from running out and therefore increase the contribution rate, responsibility of which will be imposed mostly on younger generations who have many years left to retire. This clearly shows the demographic challenges that South Korea is facing, which I think will be a great topic to get to know more about for the next month.
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