2021 Activity Report

March Activity Report

March 2022
Global Japan Office Coordinator
AHN Soyon

In Korea, the first semester started in March, one month earlier than in Japan. Because most lectures were held remotely due to Covid-19, students are not in the campus until the second semester of last year. In addition, since the entry of foreign students was severely restricted, it was rare to see foreign students on or off campus. However, since the first semester of this year, we have switched to face-to-face lectures, and the campus has come alive with the energy of students. The restrictions on entry into Korea have also been lifted, and overseas students are entering Korea one after another. However, it is still difficult to hold an exchange meeting with a large number of Japanese and Korean students as was the case before Covid-19, but I thought that language exchange between individuals would be possible if we follow the prevention measures against Covid-19 infection.

Therefore, the GJO Seoul Office decided to provide a wide range of opportunities for students in the Japanese Language Program as well as students in other departments who are interested in Japanese language and culture to make Japanese friends. As a first step, I asked professors in charge of Japanese language and studies courses in the Liberal Arts Program to introduce the "Offline Language Exchange". I want Japanese students to make many Korean friends during their study abroad experience. And I want Korean students to have a place where they meet Japanese friends while having difficulty traveling to and from overseas. I will be happy if they can once again feel how good it is to interact face-to-face that they have lost in the pandemic.

February Activity Report

February 2022
Global Japan Office Coordinator
AHN Soyon

At an exchange meeting once, a student said, "It is strange that our ancestors were discriminated against by Japan and regarded Japan as an enemy only 100 years ago during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945, which Korea calls the period of Japanese colonialism), but now university students from both countries are building friendly relations. I told him, "There are records from that time of friendly exchanges among civilians." The student responded that it was the first time he had heard of it.

I introduced him to a film titled "Michi: Hakujino hito, (??? ??-??? ?? ??)" which depicted the friendship between a Korean crafts researcher, Takumi Asakawa, and a Korean, and I realized then that the history of private exchange was surprisingly little known.

In the middle of such modern and contemporary history, I received an e-mail that the Japan Foundation Seoul Cultural Center was going to hold a course on the theme of Japanese who love Korea. For three weeks, experts were to give lectures on Chizuko Tauchi, who devoted her life to helping orphans in Korea and is called the "Mother of Korean Orphans"; Yi Bangja, the last Crown Princess of the Korean Empire, who devoted herself to educating handicapped children and was respected as the "Mother of Korean Disabled Children"; and brothers Noritaka and Takumi Asakawa, who loved Korean folk crafts The schedule was as follows.

We sympathized with the purpose of the course, which was to seek a path of friendship between Japan and Korea by understanding the period of that time. All lectures were to give in Korean, so any interested student could participate.

The students who participated in the event expressed their impressions as follows.

��I thought maybe the reason we are interacting with each other like this now is because even in those times, there were exchanges that transcended nationalities.��

��I think it was because there were many private Japanese-Korean couples like Ms. Chizuko Tauchi that Ms. Lee established the Japanese Women's Association in Korea. I heard that the wife of a famous Korean painter at that time was also Japanese. There are quite a few cases where love was born regardless of time, place, or nationality!��

��Today I learned for the first time that Japanese people tried to protect Gwanghwamun (???), the symbol of Seoul. I would like to visit the Japanese Folk Art Museum after the pandemic is resolved.��

Through this lecture, I wanted to tell you about the strong power of private-sector exchange. I hope that our current exchange activities will be the seed of brighter Japan-Korea relations.

January Activity Report

January 2022
Global Japan Office Coordinator
AHN Soyon

When the COVID-19 epidemic began, few people expected the disaster to last more than two years. Before COVID-19, students who wanted to study or work in Japan would visit Japan to see with their own eyes, and make their decision to study or work based on their own experiences. However, now that students cannot come to Japan, the uncertainty of the convergence of these issues, as well as visa and other problems makes them feel uneasy about studying or working in Japan.

I asked my professors how I could provide accurate information and realistic stories to Korean students who are unsure about studying or working in Japan for these reasons. He told me about "Cyber Japan Experience", a lecture KERIS (Korea Education and Research Information Service) is developing.

The lecture was uploaded in late 2019, just before COVID-19, and includes videos taken by lecturers of Cyber Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, with images that use the virtual tour function to enhance realism. It includes video footage, and some images have been made more realistic with the virtual tour feature.

The lectures are rich in content and include Japanese food, clothing, housing, working in Japan, and countermeasures for illness, accidents, and earthquake. You will be able to experience various aspects of life in Japan.

In addition, you can also learn how to make Japanese friends and how to enjoy Japanese culture. As the GJO Seoul office is committed to providing highly reliable information, we felt comfortable introducing this program because it was conducted by instructors with expertise in the field.

Although it has become more difficult to study or find a job after COVID-19 than before, it is not at all impossible as government agencies in both Japan and Korea have continued projects to move forward. It is certainly a difficult situation, but we do not want to lose one of our options for the future because of our current situation.

December Activity Report

December 2021
Global Japan Office Coordinator
AHN Soyon

At GJO Seoul, we sometimes receive requests from Korean students for help in preparing for job interviews at Japanese companies. One of these requests was for a mock interview. This students had a JLPT N1 rating and could read and write Japanese very well, but was not so good at speaking. She was unsure as to she could convey her thoughts and talents to the interviewer in Japanese.

Right away, I began preparing for the mock interview at the Seoul office. I looked up 50 common interview questions and sample responses on Japanese job hunting websites. I then gave the student a list of frequently asked questions and asked her to prepare her answers in Korean and then translate them into Japanese. Her responses were excellent, and I only had to make a few changes to the vocabulary and expressions, referring to the sample responses I had found online. Even though kanji notations might be the same in Japanese and Korean, they often have different meanings and nuances. Also expressions seemed too assertive when translated directly and so I changed those to soften them a bit.

The next step was to have the student practice speaking in her own words, summarizing her thoughts in her own way, even when she was asked unexpected questions. It would be great if she could speak fluently using the difficult N1 level vocabulary and expressions she had mastered, but native-level proficiency cannot be achieved in a short period of time. Her N1 certification was sufficient to prove her Japanese language skills, so I encouraged her to practice speaking using her own words to convey what she wanted to say to the interviewer. There is often pressure to speak using difficult vocabulary and expressions, in order to leave the impression that you are an excellent candidate, but our advice to students who come to the GJO office is, ��The interviewer does not expect you to speak Japanese like a native speaker when you clearly are not. What the interviewer wants to know is who you are, your talents, and your Japanese language skills to the extent that you can communicate properly in your own words. Rather than forcing yourself to use difficult words and expressions and failing to convey everything you want to say, you should simply try to combine words from the Japanese vocabulary that you are most familiar with to convey your thoughts. That is, after all, a perfectly good demonstration of your language skills.

Released from the tension of having to use difficult words and expressions, the student was able, after much practice, to communicate her thoughts in her own words. Her dream is to get a job in a Japanese company and become a member of a team working to build friendly relations between Japan and Korea in business. I will be happy if her practice with us leads to the realization of that dream.

November Activity Report

November 2021
Global Japan Office Coordinator
AHN Soyon

The corona pandemic brought an all-stop to overseas study, and foreign students were rarely seen in the university towns of South Korea. However, restrictions on studying abroad were gradually lifted in the second semester of this year, and students from Japan began to enter the country one after another, although not to the same extent as before the Corona pandemic. The Korean government has announced that the country will enter the "with Corona" (a.k.a. gradual restoration of normalcy) period from November, following a period of social distancing (emergency regime), and the educational field has decided to switch entirely to offline classes. Therefore, we have decided to resume the offline Language Exchange and social events that had been suspended since the Corona pandemic. We are happy to think that students from Japan and Korea will be able to deepen their friendship again at the exchange events and language exchanges that were the most popular among the projects that the GJO Seoul office had developed. However, we would like to wait and see how the with Corona system goes before organizing a large-group exchange event, since it has just started.

I informed the Korean students who had been looking forward to the Language Exchange for a long time that it would be reopened, and I also contacted the international students from Japan who had come to study in Japan. Both Japanese and Korean students were very pleased with the response, and we wanted to offer more opportunities for exchange to more students. As expected, new opportunities for socializing are hard to come by during the Corona pandemic, so I think the reopening of the Language Exchange will be a great opportunity for all of us.

October Activity Report

October 2021
Global Japan Office Coordinator
AHN Soyon

When it comes time to prepare for their job interviews, students listen to the news more than usual to deepen their knowledge of current events. They check not only the news in the Korean press but also news from all over the world. Students who want to work at Japanese companies read the news from Japan without fail.

These days, we use Internet sites rather than newspapers to check news. The headlines play a big role as they allow you to choose whatever catches your eye to keep track of the day's events. There is a limited amount of vocabulary and grammar used in headlines, which makes them an efficient study material. I practiced with my students preparing for job interviews to show them how to use the headlines to expand their knowledge of current events.

First, I told the students to read news about the COVID-19 pandemic for a period of five days and make a list of words that appeared more than once. I chose COVID-19 as the topic is because it is being widely reported on in countries around the world. Though they may be seeing some of the Japanese words for the first time, the subject will be familiar to them as it is also being reported on in the Korean press, which they have certainly read at least once. Even if they encounter the Japanese words for the first time, they have sufficient background knowledge to figure out what those words might mean. Even when terms are Romanized differently in Japanese and Korea, even when similar policies are referred to in different ways in the two countries, it should be possible to surmise the meanings so long as the students have some mastery of both the Japanese and Korean languages. Finally, news about COVID-19 is not a one-time event but appears daily and the same vocabulary is repeated every day, making it easy to memorize the terms. Furthermore, I believe that this is a useful learning method for students preparing for interviews and debates in Japanese, as it not only helps them to learn the language but also keeps them knowledgeable about current events and issues. I plan to continue to provide study methods using familiar materials like this.

September Activity Report

September 2021
Global Japan Office Coordinator
AHN Soyon

One of the reasons Korean people give up learning Japanese halfway is because of Kanji. About 70-80% of the Korean language is written in Chinese characters, but since it is written in Hangul, we hardly ever see Chinese characters. Therefore, if you think that you will have to keep learning kanji forever while studying Japanese, you will feel faint and want to give up. In fact, as a former student of Japanese, I had the same experience, and I understand the feelings of learners.

If you look at the kanji words used in Japan and Korea, you will find that the phonetic sounds of the kanji used in both countries are similar because they have the same kanji culture. In fact, there is an equation-like rule that says "a certain sound in Korean is this sound in Japanese." Until you realize this, however, you have to learn a lot of vocabulary and accumulate a database. Once you understand the rule, the burden of memorizing Kanji words will be reduced, but it is a long way to go. Therefore, the GJO Seoul Office has prepared a project to introduce the rules to learners. Since there are many Chinese characters in the Korean language that we use in our daily lives, when I gave familiar examples, the learners were able to understand them immediately. For example, "�� �k" is read as "chul bal" in Korean, but in Japanese it is read as "shutsu hatsu. You can see that letters that end with the "L" sound in Korean end with the "tsu" sound in Japanese. This rule does not necessarily apply to vocabulary that ends with the "L" sound, but in most cases it is somewhat predictable.

The students liked it more than I expected. They said, "I thought they sounded somewhat similar, but now that I've listened to your explanation, it's clearer in my mind." and "I used to memorize things by rote, which took a lot of time and was hard to remember, but now I think I can remember things more efficiently." I would like to continue the projects like this that are useful for learning Japanese.

August Activity Report

August 2021
Global Japan Office Coordinator
AHN Soyon

Recently, regional studies has become as popular as languages studies, and more and more students are majoring in regional studies. The means to learn about social culture and the opportunities to come in contact with social culture have increased, and these are effective means for studying languages. As an evolution of that, the GJO Seoul Office held the previous activity of comparing Japan with Korea through Japanese dramas and movies.

In the midst of the pandemic, we enjoyed dramas and movies and were able to share parts of the story that we had missed before, which was well received. When we compared the two, some of the students wondered, "Why is this the case in Japan?�� It was an activity that aroused the students' curiosity. There was an abundance of information available in Korean alone, including books on Japan, materials analyzed by companies, and the Internet, so everyone was able to participate regardless of their Japanese language skills. In particular, I asked them to enjoy giving presentations for the preparation of the presentation for the second semester of classes beginning in September. They would have learned more about the wider world from each other's presentations, and from that would have come new questions about the wider world. However, as I was worried, there were cases where unreliable blogs and community articles were used as source material. I also felt that it is important to cultivate the language skills to identify the correct information and not just rely on articles translated by others. I hope that this activity will be a place for students who will become bridges between Japan and Korea in the future to understand each other properly.

July Activity Report

July 2021
Global Japan Office Coordinator
AHN Soyon

Due to Covid-19, it is still difficult to leave the country including traveling. Compared to the days before the pandemic, students have almost no chance to show off the Japanese they have learned. The lack of the opportunity can lead to a decline in motivation to learn despite all the hard work they've done. In order to create a place where they use Japanese, the GJO Seoul office is always looking for fun themes that will help them improve their skills.

I participated in a special seminar to commemorate the publication of a new teaching material by the Japan Foundation Seoul Japan Culture Center. The main contents were the explanation on the concept of the book and practical examples in Korea. Among them, the introduction of situations and tasks that might actually happen overseas was very interesting. The task on using online stores was interesting to learners. Review is one of the big criteria for choosing a product online. If learners can read the reviews on your own and make a purchase, they feel a sense of accomplishment.

I received many topics and examples, and I would like to try to create new activities with materials and methods that suit the learners of the GJO office. What I am most concerned about now is maintaining the motivation of the learners. I hope that our activities will provide positive impact to them and lead to further improvement in their Japanese language skills.

June Activity Report

June 2021
Global Japan Office Coordinator
AHN Soyon

Our life has changed a lot since the pandemic, and the campus life has changed as well. One of the changes is that students take classes online instead of going to classroom. In the first half of FY2021, online lectures continued as in FY2020. At first, we had some trial and error. Now the online lectures has continued for more than a year, so both teachers and students got used to this system.

In Korea, the first semester ends with the final exam in mid-June. This exam is to check what students have learned so far, and at the same time, to evaluate the results of their efforts. Everyone wants to get better grades. However, there are some students who can't keep up with the class, as online lectures are less communicative and less focused than face-to-face lectures. In fact, there are reports that students' learning ability has declined since the Covid-19 era. This is because they get overwhelmed by the atmosphere in the regular lectures and leave your questions unanswered, and the questions has accumulated till the exam and there is nothing they can do about it.

Therefore, the GJO supports students in resolving their questions that could not be resolved in regular lectures. I do not only answer the questions, but also propose study methods together to improve students' problem-solving and learning abilities. Also, for students who feel pressured to ask questions, I wanted to make the GJO office a room where they can casually knock the door.

May Activity Report

May 2021
Global Japan Office Coordinator
AHN Soyon

When we study vocabulary, we find the words that are in Japan but not in Korea. For example, there is no Korean words equivalent for ��Noren��. When it comes to "lower the Noren (That means the store will be closed)" and "sharing the Noren (franchise) ", we are moving from the language field to the cultural field. Language is a part of culture, and the deeper you understand the culture, the more accurate your vocabulary choices are. In fact, there is always a cultural introduction section in Japanese texts, and sometimes articles introducing Japanese culture are given as reading comprehension questions.

Before Covid-19, there were many exhibitions introducing Japan, but now there were fewer opportunities to experience Japanese culture as events were cancelled or changed to online.

Due to the prolonged restrictions on going out, the number of people using the OTT service (Over�Cthe-Top service (YouTube etc) has increased rapidly, and people have started to watch many Japanese dramas and movies. I came up with the idea of studying culture through the media. We focused on unfamiliar scenes in Korean dramas and movies, things that we can't find in Korean dramas and movies or in our daily lives, character fashion, gestures, room props, streets, and so on, and introduced the impressive scenes to the friends.

Then there were a lot of interesting opinions. "In Korea, it is common to buy toasts at a food truck before going to work, but in Japan it is more common to buy lunch from a food truck." "In Korean dramas, there are many scenes in cars such as moving in a car or meeting in a car, but in Japan, there are fewer scenes in which people move. When they move, they seem to be on bicycles, walking or running, especially on bridges. But they use taxi more than in Korea. I heard that Japanese can't buy cars if they can't secure a parking lot. Is that the reason?" "In Japan, except for gourmet dramas, there are very few scenes of eating. I understood how much Koreans are particular about food." "Korean cabin attendants already wear uniforms when they commute, while Japanese wear plain clothes." "Japan uses LINE, Korea uses Kakao Talk." "In Korea, round glasses are common, but in Japan, people prefer longer glasses." Some students were interested and even searched and read related articles about such as the situation of Japanese private cars and LINE's business strategies. I realized that we had overlooked these areas, and it would be good if we deepen our understanding of both countries as well as improve our language ability by taking an interest in Japanese society and culture.

April Activity Report

April 2021
Global Japan Office Coordinator
AHN Soyon

One of the consultations with GJO Seoul office is "text selection." It is true that you need a textbook to start studying, and we understand the desire to study with a textbook that is learner-friendly and enjoyable. There are approximately 450 kinds of books related to Japanese language study available in large bookstores in Korea, and it can be difficult to choose the textbook that best suits your needs.

The GJO Seoul office asks some questions about the text selection: the purpose of studying Japanese, the expected study time to achieve the purpose, and the skills you want to improve (listening, reading, speaking, and writing). It would be nice if students could improve their Japanese like native speakers as quickly as possible, but in order to do so, they must take each step of the process. Therefore, along with the selection of textbooks, we also work to create a study plan based on their learning objectives, skills, and study time. In this way, GJO Seoul Office understand what the student is trying to achieve, and provide him/her with the appropriate learning method such as textbook usage and any other useful materials and information. We would like to continue to support students in many ways so that they can continue to enjoy studying Japanese.

It is beneficial for learners who are planning to make their study plan, as they can also do planning consultations together. I think it is a very necessary process especially for beginners.

Among them are cute wishes such as "I want to be able to speak Japanese as soon as possible." "I want to be able to read, listen, speak, and write Japanese." and "I wish I could speak Japanese like my mother tongue."