This weekend marked the beginning of Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the US and clocks were moved ahead one hour. We remember this by the phrase, “fall back spring ahead”. DST runs from March until November each year.
Large countries, like the US, may have as many as three time zones. China, on the other hand, uses a single time zone for their entire country (UTC+8). North and South Korea use a single time zone called Korea Standard Time (KST). Neither country utilizes Daylight Savings Time although South Korea had considered using it several years ago and eventually abandoned the idea. Korea is UTC + 9 hours.
한국 표준시 (hanguk pyojunsi) – Korea Standard Time (KST) 일광 절약 시간제 (ilgwang-jeolyak sigan-je) – Daylight Savings Time (DST)
Note: DST is commonly called 썸머타임 – which is literally ‘summertime’ (sseommeo-taim)
Easy to Learn Korean 664 – Time Zones
Here are some interesting thoughts on why some people believe DST is useless.
Korea’s KakaoTalk is a free multi-platform instant messaging app with over 70 million users (mostly in Korea). It’s available for free on Apple iOS, Google Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry phones. The app developers admitted to have been inspired by WhatsApp of the US but they’ve gone on to expand the design. It features a phone number based ID system where your contact list is automatically compared to existing Kakao users and matches are determined to be ‘friends’. KakaoTalk’s explosive growth and success derives from Korea’s quick adaptation to smartphones. Even the word ‘Kakao’ has become synonymous with chatting in Korean.
카카오톡 (kakao-tok) – KakaoTalk
If you’re living in Korea or have Korean friends abroad, you’ll find KakaoTalk to be indispensable. While it doesn’t necessarily do anything better than other instant messaging apps, you’re guaranteed to find other Koreans using it. I frequently travel and communicate with international friends and KakaoTalk sadly has no use for me. Instead, I spend most of my time using Apple’s iMessage, FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, and Skype. KakaoTalk does support mVOIP for making calls to other Kakao users, but the quality is very poor (especially when calling internationally). I also dislike the app feature that automatically makes every contact a potential app ‘friend’.
KakaoTalk has been in the news recently for several privacy issues as they had stored personal messages on their servers for up to 10 days. Currently, messages are stored for 5-7 days and they’re looking to reduce this in the future. Full story here. On March 6, they posted a notice to the app that there were further security issues and the Emoticons, Themes, and Plus Friend features had to de-activated until users installed a new version of the app.
NHN’s Line is another popular Korean messaging app with over 100 million users globally.
네이버 (neibeo) – Naver, also a Korean language search engine and portal site 네이버라인 (neibeo-ra-in) – Naver Line
North Korean defectors must keep their identities and personal information confidential. If this information is leaked, family members who are living in the North face severe punishment or torture. Sadly, a defector who was working for the South Korean government on a 2-year assignment, was arrested by the NIS for leaking the identities of defectors to the North. Reports state that data on as many as 10,000 North Korean defectors might have been revealed.
President Park Geun-Hye began choosing her Cabinet members on Saturday. Among them, a former Army chief of staff was named Director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS). The NIS is Korea’ central intelligence agency, like the US CIA. Full story at the Korea Times.
