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Omar- Group Fellow Meetings

Group Fellow Meetings - Omar



Hello!

Usually on Mondays there is a Group Fellow meeting that is held in the Youth Olympic Center near Shibuya. First I guess I should explain what a group fellow is. To put it in simple terms, a Fellow is a leader of a hippo "family." On these Mondays the Group Fellow members and do a special meeting where they can get information from the LEX Headquarters and they can also listen to special presentations. I had the chance once to speak and introduce myself in front of all the fellows once.


Today I am going to talk about a special guest that we had from South Korea, Mr. Min Byeong Gyu. He and his wife helped a lot with the hippo branch in South Korea so he came to Japan as a special guest and spoke to us. It was a bit difficult for me to understand because of the language gap but I did not need words or a language to understand his passion. When Mr. Min Byeong Gyu was younger he would perform and sing opera in front of many people. He gave us the privileged and sang to us in many different languages. While he sang he also moved his body to help emphasis the important of the sounds. I thought it was pretty cool that he could sing in many different languages. He sang songs in English, Italian, Spanish, Korean and etc.

[Mr. Min Byeong Gy is the gentleman sitting to the left, while Mr. Sakakibara is to the right in the photo].


When Mr. Min Byeong Gyu was performing for us, I noticed that Mr. Sakakibara would also sing along to the songs that he would know. Regardless of the language he still new the rhythm of the song  and could sing a long. But I am pretty sure he knew the language as well as the rhythm.






I also had to chance to see an old video of one of Mr. Sakakibaras lectures. The video was in both Japanese and Korean! There was a Korean gentleman that was translating for Mr. Sakakibara. Mr. Sakakibara spoke about how human interaction and relationship is very important in learning any language. He even used his grandson as an example as a child that has the potential to learn many languages if given the proper setting. Because I am currently studying Japanese I found it super interesting about his way of learning languages and cultures and I wish I could have been involved in LEX sooner!!!!





- Omar

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