Every now and then I see someone on YouTube wonder how it can be that the streets and sidewalks here in Korea are so clean while there are no public trashcans available. The secret is: Old people.

Let me explain, every morning when I go to the daycare with my son I see between 5 and 10 elderly people walk along the street with their yellow vests - which say "Pangyo Senior Welfare Center" on their back - and pick up all the trash. I guess this is some kind of a thing they do to keep them engaged and moving.

I personally don't think Korean food is overly spicy, it's just that I don't like this specific kind of spicy from the chili flakes. Somehow they are in 80% of the Korean food.

With climate change and the 52 degree Celsius in Deli in India I expected June in Korea to be devastating this year. But to my surprise I still didn't turn on the AC. It's still less than 30 degrees and especially the humidity is very low when I compare it to the last years I was here, it's not raining yet either.

And the air pollution is not so bad either this year. All in all I'm not suffering this year yet, even though the summer is already here.

We have to pay half a million out of our pocket even though his mom is Korean, but the baby is not, because his mom wasn't Korean when he was born.

Another fun thing is that foreign families in the area where we live get 100k KRW for the daycare, but our family can't because his mom is Korean. So we get nothing ^^. Great system :p

But anyway, I hope he will like it there, it's a Montessori daycare, I'm not sure if this is something good or something bad in the long run, I hope he can play and doesn't have to sit and learn anything from some curriculum. There will be enough time for that once he is at school.

I just got some wartime alarm on the phone. Did you guys get it to in Korea?

I've been living in Korea for about three and a half years now. I have the language around me, my partner and her daughter speak it at home. But for some reason I am not learning anything from being exposed to it for such a long time.

I tried using apps like Duolingo, Drops, etc. but practically nothing really stuck, perhaps a word here or there. I watched Korean Dramas with English subtitles, but because the order of the words in a Korean sentence is the opposite to English I would never be able to know which word is which.

Two month ago I saw some Korean Teacher advertising 1-1 teaching of Korean so I decided to try it and to pay for help, because I feel I'm really stuck. Now after 2 months she expressed frustration about my progress. She asked me why it's so slow, if it's the first time I'm learning a new language (no, this is my 5th language I'm learning).

It's very frustrating. I feel I invest a lot of the little free time I have into it and it's embarrassing how little I have to show for it. The Korean words are so totally different from the words in my other Languages (Polish, German, Swedish, English) that they more often than not blend together and I remember and hear mostly gibberish.

I always hated learning grammar and vocabulary in every language. And somehow with the other languages I magically got to a level where I would just be exposed to the language and could watch TV and talk to people and would get better at it without much effort.

But Korean proves to be very difficult for me to get to this point. I get that I only will get there with consistency and a lot of grinding, there seems no other way for me.

I can only imagine it helps, if it has sleeping wagons - designated for boosting birth rate - connected to it.

We are visiting the inlaws and making dumplings.

No idea if that is a korean tradition or a chinese korean tradition.

Anyway, happy lunar new year everyone!

Hello, Korea community. I taught English in Korea for a few years over a decade ago. At the time, my bank I used in the U.S. was Wells Fargo. I had an absolutely awful experience with them while in Korea. I never once had access to the money in the Wells Fargo account the entire time I lived in Korea.

I told them ahead of time I was moving to Korea and to allow transactions there. I don't know if they did, but it got overriden/expired, or if they just pretended to. Either way, when I tried to get money out of that account it failed every time. They would alert me to "fraudulent activity" and lock my card. I had to call, tell them it's me, I live in Korea, like I said, so please unblock my card and allow transactions from Korea. I did this probably ten times before giving up. I was so mad about it that the first thing I did when I moved back to the U.S. was close my Wells Fargo account.

I am looking at living in Korea again for a time, but I don't want a repeat of last time. Does anyone have any recommendations for banks that understand that sometimes people actually leave the U.S. and still may need access to their money? I am not opposed to even trying to bank with Wells Fargo again if they are no longer terrible from Korea.

I will have a Korean bank account, and get pay to the Korean account, but may need access to money in my U.S. account for emergency cash.

Hello. I am from Korea. I heard of Lemmy while I was browsing the Korean community DCinside. I thought lemmy.world was "the" Lemmy community. But it turns out each community is hosted by different people, which are divided into smaller communities?

Lemmy is not well known in South Korea. To be honest I don't really know how this federated system works. But I do hope people can take a look at communities not funded by corporate.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11193156

A Danish report on Thursday said that adoptions of children from South Korea to Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s was “characterized by systematic illegal behavior” in the Asian country.

These violations, the report said, made it “possible to change information about a child’s background and adopt a child without the knowledge of the biological parents.”

The report was the latest in a dark chapter of international adoptions. In 2013, the government in Seoul started requiring foreign adoptions to go through family courts. The move ended the decadeslong policy of allowing private agencies to dictate child relinquishments, transfer of custodies and emigration.

The Danish Appeals Board, which supervises international adoptions, said there was “an unfortunate incentive structure where large sums of money were transferred between the Danish and South Korean organizations” over the adoption

It'd be funny if it weren't so tragic. Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world and it has many reasons, 4th quater last year was 0.6 children per woman. Here is one of the reasons:

I'm a stay at home dad and I'll need to go back to work in 4 months. We're both foreigners so our son is foreigner too even if he was born in Korea. We called the nursery which is close to us here and they said there a 30 babies in line but that doesn't even matter, because as foreigners we are not allowed to be in that line anyway.

So I have two options, either hire a nanny which will consume most of what I'm making probably, or don't go to work, which is probably what I'll have to do, which is problematic for more than just the money reason. If this continues, I guess moving back to Europe will become a necessity more than just a wish from my side.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9547028

The latest forecast by Statistics Korea puts the population in 2072 at 36.2 million, a 30% decline from the current 51.7 million, even though the fertility rate may recover a bit to 0.68 in 2026. The population is expected to fall every year starting in 2025.