Saturday, August 9, 2014

God and Family

Aug 1, 2014

Dear Family,

I told you I would have a new Korean word for you each week, and since I didn’t have one for you last week, here’s two to make up for it:

하나님 pronounced ‘hah-nah-neem’, means God. This one is interesting because the first part, ‘hah-nah’ means one, and ‘neem’ is an honorific suffix. I thought that was really cool.

가족 pronounced ‘kah-joke’, means family.

Korean is really cool because of how the characters look. . . like some kind of code. It is also really cool to listen to people speak it. My teacher, Brother Memmott, is like the coolest guy ever, he has a really strong spirit about him. But anyway, it’s just really cool to listen to him speak Korean.

One of the members of the Korean branch presidency came to a district meeting and told us some interesting facts about Korea:

  • The highest rated airport in the world is in Seoul
  • There are 75 million Korean speakers in the world
  • Since the Korean war, South Korea has grown to 15th in the world in GDP
  • In South Korea, about 45% of the people are atheist, and 30% are Christian, but their culture has underlying Shamanistic beliefs
  • Writing someone’s name in red ink means you wish they were dead because death rolls are written in red ink
  • The number 4 is considered bad luck, equivalent to the number 13 in our culture
  • Stabbing your chopsticks into your rice means death to your host
  • Showing the bottom of your feet is disrespectful
I hope you all have a great week!

Love,
Elder Hines

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