Language Lesson (Feb 25)

• A random fancy thing about Korea: Elevators actually close when you push the “close door” button. Who woulda thought?
• One of our “lectures” today was 3 hours (!) of learning games. At first, I was annoyed that it was so long, but it was definitely better than being in the lecture room for that time and ended up being pretty fun. I think my favorite game was “Worm” – we were in groups of 8 groups of 6-7, held on to each other’s hands and had to try to catch other groups and add them to our line. It was dangerous (kind of along the lines of Red Rover) but fun for sure.
• Our Head Coordinator’s family came today and we got to play with her kids! They are so adorable and really smart. We taught them the Baby Shark song; they caught on to all of the motions and then remembered it later in the night! So cute. Darryl taught the daughter (age 4) some adorable faces too. It was so fun and such a relief from lectures (and a little taste of what teaching will be like).
• Tonight we learned more Korean! It was stressful (our teacher went fast) but I’m adding to the things I can say. I still don’t know any sentence structure, but I can recognize most of the letters of the Hangul alphabet and I use these phrases:

Kam sa ham ni da - 감사합니다 - thank you

An nyeung ha se yo - 안녕하세요 - hello/how are you

Ne - 네 - yes

Anniyo - 아니오 - no

Ha ji ma - 하지마 - don't do that

Pong chi ji ma - don't lie to me! (slang)

San saeng nim - 선생님 - teacher

Omma - 엄마 - mom

Oppa - 오빠 - literally means "older brother" but is used as a term of endearment from a girl to a boy (who is slightly older than her)