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Post-279: The President is Unpopular Again

1/30/2015

The President of South Korea, Park Geun-hye, is not popular. She has surpassed 60% disapproval. Only 34.5% (+/- 2%) in a poll last week said they approve of her.

I first wrote about this in post #10 ("Unpopular Leaders"). At the time, April 2013, I wrote the following (with [bracketed] explanations added), information I'd gotten from the newspaper:

Presidential Approval After One Month in Office [according to the Korea Herald]
% Approval.................President...............Year
..........71%.................Kim Young-Sam.......1993 [centrist; first non-military president since 1961]
..........71%.................Kim Dae-Jung.............1998 [left-wing; began Sunshine Policy with NK]
..........60%................Roh Moo-Hyun........2003 [left-wing; elected during anti-U.S. hysteria of 2002]
..........52%................Lee Myung-Bak.........2008 [right-wing freemarket type]
..........41%.................Park Geun-Hye..........2013 [right-wing, daughter of 1960s-1970s strongman General Park]

[O]ne cannot help think that Koreans are getting more and more cynical about their leaders, as time goes on.

Park Geun-Hye's popularity today (34.5%) has not much changed from its level of two years ago (41%). But people are more deeply annoyed now:

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Post-278: Marxists to Lead a Government in Europe Again

1/28/2015

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It's Greece.

For the record, that was a long run of 25 years (1990-2014) of no Marxist governments in Europe.

The self-described "radical left" Syriza party (Syriza is a Greek acronym for "Coalition of the Radical Left") got 36.3% of vote in Greece January 2015, which was first place. The Greek system gives an extra fifty seats to the party in first place (an interesting idea, though I'm not sure a good one) which gives them 149 seats of 300, two seats from a majority. They'll bring in some minor partner and will govern Greece. Their leader, Tsipras, is already sworn in.

If the new government refuses outright to continue to pay Greece's substantial debt to the (capitalist) foreign banks, as they probably will, they may be expelled from the EU, like Malaysia expelled Singapore in 1965.

Then what?

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Post-277: Encounter with a Retarded Young Man

1/24/2015

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Bucheon, Korea, Evening of January 22nd. A mentally-retarded young man spotted me on a bus and began to follow me after we got off. He insisted I take a handful of coins he had. I politely rejected his offer of the coins. He didn't accept my answer. He kept offering the coins, and kept following me.

At first he gestured towards a bakery-coffeeshop (I doubt his coins' value were sufficient to buy anything there). After we passed it, he pointed to a nearby fruit seller. It seemed he wanted to eat together. The young man was literally and metaphorically extending his hand in a gesture of friendship.

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Post-276: Low Five (Or, How We are Remembered)

1/22/2015

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A huge majority of what we see, hear, and experience on a given day doesn't create any lasting memory. Every day we impact others through words and deeds, and others impact us, but most of it is lost, sooner or later, in the foggy nether-regions of memory. We can't choose which of our words or deeds will stick in another's memory, creating a lasting impact. Nor can they choose what they do that ends up impacting us. You never know what it will be. It's all kind of like a cosmic casino. It's one reason life is interesting.

I had a student five years ago named J.G. Lee. I remember him as small and smiling, naive and optimistic, and humorous but polite. I think he was in 7th grade at the time. After four and a half years of no contact at all, I recently came to learn a primary memory he has of me, and was thereby moved to write these words:

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Post-275: Not So Much Water After All

1/19/2015

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All the world's water and air, to scale (from here):

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Post-274: Malaysia-Singapore-Korea Cookie Mystery

1/17/2015

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Here is a mystery.

Currant Butter Cookies (600 calories) -- White Castle -- "Traditional Recipe"
Made in Penang, Malaysia
Imported by Singapore
Ended up in Incheon, South Korea, selling for 1,000 Won (=90 U.S. cents) in January 2015, where it was bought by me.

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Post-273: [Korean] Early Childhood Education in a Foreign Language

1/16/2015

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I wrote, memorized, and delivered the following presentation in Korean this week. It probably reached five minutes in total with the question and answer period.

외국어조기교육
안녕하십니까? 저는 "외국어 조기 교육"에 대한 발표를 준비했고 지금부터 그 발표를 하겠습니다.

외국어조기교육이란 초등학교에 입학하기 전에 외국어를 배우는 것을 뜻합니다. 예를 들어, 영어를 가르치는 유치원들은 조기교육으로 볼 수 있습니다.

외국어조기교육은가르치는 방법에 따라 두 가지 종류로 나누어 볼 수 있습니다. 첫째는 외국어 유치원에서 공부하는 것이고, 둘째 집에 있을 때 텔레비전이나 컴퓨터를 봐 가면서 외국어를 배우는 것입니다. 그러니까 활동적인 방법도 있고 수동적인 방법도 있습니다.

외국어 조기 교육에 대해서 더 설명하겠습니다. 많은 한국인 부모님들은 영어를 일찍 배우는 것이 좋다고 생각합니다. 그러니까, 요즘 한국에 있는 영어를 가르치는 유치원이 많아졌다고 합니다. 그런 유치원 중에 한국인 아이들을 외국인 원어민 선생님이 가르치는 곳도 있습니다. 그 곳에서 한국인 아이들은 재미있게 놀아 가면서 영어를 배울 수 있습니다.

외국어조기교육에 찬성하는 사람도 있고 반대하는 사람도 있지만 이 발표에서 의견에 대해 이야기 못 합니다. 그래서, 이 것으로 제 발표를 모두 마치겠습니다. 질문이 있으면 꼭 물어보세요. 감사합니다.

Early Childhood Education in a Foreign Language
Hello. I have prepared a presentation about "early childhood education in a foreign language" and I'd like to deliver it now.

What do we mean when we talk about "early childhood education in a foreign language"? It means learning a foreign language before entering elementary school. We can see foreign-language kindergartens as an example.

We can divide foreign language learning in early childhood into two types, according to the method used. The first is kindergarten, and the second is learning through watching TV or something on the computer. Therefore both active and passive methods exist.

Let me explain some more about early childhood foreign language education. Many Korean parents believe that learning English at a young age is a good idea. Therefore, the number of English kindergartens has increased in recent times. Among these kindergartens, there are also those in which Korean children are taught by foreign native-speaker teachers. In these places, Korean children can learn English through having fun, playing games.

There are both supporters and opponents of this practice, but in this presentation I am not allowed to talk about opinions, and so with that my presentation ends. If you have any questions, please ask them now. Thank you.

This is what I wrote on the white board as I was going along:

___________________________
"Early Childhood Foreign Language Education"
Age 1 to 6 : Learning lang.

Kindergarten ......... TV / Computer
(Active) ............................(Passive)
______________________________

I spoke slowly and I think everyone understood what I said. I knew the presentation went well because other students promptly asked me coherent and thoughtful questions:

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Post-272: What Happened to Standards of Decency?

1/15/2015

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High-profile political killings in France last week.

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Post-271: China's Dream

1/14/2015

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Is China going to take over as world superpower? The question came up as we sat eating chicken one late December 2014 evening in Sinchon, Seoul. I sat with three South Koreans (by birth), male, born between the late 1970s and 1990, all of whom had lived extensively abroad.

One had lived half his life in England and had the air of a British intellectual about him. (He reminded me of my former coworker M.G. from England, despite the racial difference.) He said the "key question" was whether China would make moves towards being the "world police," as the USA has been for something around about seventy years now.

I said I didn't think China was interested in being world police. (This is not the same as saying China won't be. I don't think the USA was interested either in becoming a "world superpower" at all in, say, 1900 or 1910!)

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Post-270: Leading the English Orientation

1/9/2015

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Every two months is a new semester here at the Korean Language program (at which I've studied a while at a university in the Seoul region), you see, so new students are always flowing in. On the last day of last semester, sometime in the days before Christmas, our teacher suddenly asked me if I would be okay to do the new student orientation. I said that's fine. I was asked simply because I am now the highest-level returning native English speaker here (Level 4).

There is one White American girl I formerly studied with, only about 19 years old, I think (and a a full-time regular enrolled student here taking classes in Korean and taking intensive language classes on the side), who was recently promoted to Level5 (the highest level offered here; those who want to do level 6 have to go elsewhere). She is unable to do it because she is back in the USA for the long between-semester break (which is from before Christmas to March 2nd in Korea). There is also a Singaporean -- whose name in English consists of the unlikely initials Q.X. (based on a Chinese spelling) and whose Korean name by which I know her is rendered in initials as T.S.S. She is just as much a native speaker as I am, I think. She will study filmmaking at a Korean university in 2015-2016. She may have been more qualified to do the orientation in one sense: She has lived in the dormitory a long time, which I never have. As it turned out, many students' questions were about dormitory life.

Anyway, yes, besides T.S.S. and I, there are no returning students in Level 4 or Level 5 (the highest level); almost all Chinese. They asked me. I agreed. I will write a bit about how it went.

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Post-269: Hearing the Beatles in Korea (Or, the 1910s vs. the 1960s vs. the 2010s)

1/7/2015

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Bucheon is a community nestled snugly in the Seoul Megalopolis. I lived and worked there two whole years and still go there frequently. One late Friday evening, around about August 2014, I found myself walking through Bucheon's Central Park (부천중앙공원).

Would you believe what I heard?

I heard the Beatles.

Not the real Beatles. Not a recording. I heard clearly-recognizable renditions of Beatles songs, these being songs first released around fifty years earlier. Playing them, and rather well, was a lone Korean guy in his 30s or 40s. A small crowd was gathered around. He was asking for donations in the open guitar case but seemed to be playing more for the fun of it.

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Post-268: My Real Eighth Birthday (Or, a Tribute to Germany 2007)

1/2/2015

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The year 2015 is here. January 1st of 2015 is my eighth birthday.

My real birthday is January 1st, 2007.

There are those who would say that my eighth birthday actually occurred many years ago. I concede that technically my body, a tiny version of it, entered the world many years ago, sometime back there in the 1980s, but to be honest I don't remember that at all.

Let me tell you about the day my life began. It was 1/1/2007 and it was aboard an airplane. It lifted off from Dulles Airport in Virginia on 1/1/2007 with me on board. It was the first time I left the USA.

I was off to study a while in Germany. It was an overnight flight on which passengers were expected to sleep. How could I possibly sleep on my first day of life? Jesus. I couldn't sleep. I didn't sleep. I kept staring ahead at the little screen showing the airplane's progress overlaid on a map. The plane inched along, it seemed. I kept staring ahead in the blackened airplane cabin. No one stirred. Time had slowed down to a crawl to me. Something eventful was underway, I knew.

What a glorious thing it is to have clear memories of the first day one's life.

Nervous excitement filled those first hours on the plane, and the first awkward and dizzying day in Germany itself, before I moved in with the host family. The feeling was something like the hours before playing in a football game. I played football in high school a while. We were always nervous before games, like soldiers in war must be before battle. I remember. (Little did we know at the time that football didn't really matter at all.)

I spent most of 2007 in Berlin, Germany. It was a good time. I studied German and other subjects (in English).

I knew a little German at the time of arrival but not enough to do anything, and finding my way on the first two days, suitcases in hand, was quite a misadventure in itself. I still remember clearly the exchanges I had with people. The woman of about 40 whom I asked "Could you please help me?" ("Können Sie mir helfen?") -- I was utterly lost and completely new and alone -- to which she replied with a curt "Wieso?" which is a word that generally means "Why?" but can mean "How so?". I must've been a sorry sight. Being a Berliner, she was on guard, not sure what I was up to.

Statue of Frederick the Great / central Berlin
A monument I passed by and inspected many times.

I stayed till April with a host family who spoke no English. Lucky me. I learned German pretty well. By the spring months, people occasionally thought I was a native German, as long as the conversation was very brief and to the point. At one point around about May 2007 I got my hair cut in Magdeburg at the cheapest barber around, as it turned out manned by two Iraqis. They were sure I was a native German. I didn't dare tell them I was an American, of course. They asked lots of questions. I simply said "Ich bin hier zu Besuch" (I'm here visiting) and that satisfied them. Later, the street-corner Marxist professor, a native German, whom I describe in post-#246 (see the section entitled "Communists and Anti-Communists in Berlin" in #246), as I recall, didn't do a"You're not from here, are you?" till well after several short exchanges.)

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