During week 5, because it was close to March 1st, we learned about the 100th year anniversary of March 1st, which the Korean Independence Day. It was one of the first public displays of Korean resistance towards the Japanese regime and involved many public demonstrations. It was also around the time when the 26th King Gojong passed away and had his funeral. I learned about the various famous protestors involved, as well as the intensity of the violence of the Japanese towards them. Although I had learned about it before during history class in Korea, it was a good reminder of the sacrifices of noble Korean citizens and how our independence was painfully achieved. This lesson fulfilled my interest in learning more about Korean history to connect with the past of Korean citizens. Jimin incorporated different methods of learning such as a comic that concisely detailed the events, and I thought that it was a refreshing way to learn history.
During week 6, Jimin and I discussed a Korean news article of my choice. I went onto Naver.com, which is one of the top websites in Korea that is similar to Google. It was titled “Why Trump Believes North Korea Will Become the 2nd South Korea” and had many different
vocabulary words that I was unfamiliar with. I purposefully chose a challenging article so that I would have more to learn. Before reading the article, we went over the vocabulary words I was most likely to not know of. This strategy greatly helped me to understand the article better while reading it through the first time. This article was educational because it concerned the connections between the US and Korea, and thus it is integral to my language and cultural learning as I am tying English to Korean. I hope to read more news articles on my own time to further enhance my learning about Korean culture and news updates. During this session, we continued learning more idioms, along with words that had opposite meanings to each other. This helped me to connect back to the previous session.
Comments
Korean history seems very complicated. I wish they would teach it more in depth in history classes as well. I was always interested in the history of Korea but never had the chance to take an in depth course on it. It's also good that you are challenging yourself with hard articles.
There is a museum in Korea that is solely for this national march. You can go in and experience the actual prison cells that the protestors were kept in. If you look at the individual cells, the size of the cell is ridiculous. It's basically a size of a high school locker just barely enough to fit a body in. The protestors would stay in that small cell standing.