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Monday, May 04, 2009

Learning Korean through Bible study

One of the ways my in-laws have encouraged me to learn Korean has been by giving me small items like calendars or pictures that have Bible verses written in Korean on them. I can always understand a handful of the words, but because the Bible is written in a more formal style of Korean I've always struggled to understand the full meaning without a translation. Luckily, most of them have English translations written below the verses, which makes it a fabulous teaching tool. I can place some of the words and deduce the meaning of the others based on the translation below. But now they've found a brand new teaching tool, and one that I don't even need a translation for: a baby Bible.

The book has some short re-tellings of Old Testament stories. The title is 하나님과 나/"God and I" (there is a sequel that has New Testament stories called "Jesus and I", but we don't have that book yet). The writing is really simple, so even someone as bad at Korean as I am can figure out what it means. You can see a big picture of the first page of the book by clicking on the photo at the bottom of the linked page. Here is what it says (in English):

God made this world. The heaven and the sun and the moon, the earth and the animals and the plants, everything was made by God. God has made everything for me.
Easy, right? At least, it is much easier than "Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart" which is the verse on our calendar this month. ;-) Anyone who knows a bit of Korean can read that verse in Korean here. Yeah... not exactly beginner's material, is it?

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1 have poured out their souls in electronic text: