Not Lost in Translation: Senior Amelia Stinson travels abroad to learn new languages and cultures

Senior Amelia Stinson was exhausted. 

She had just spent the last 19 hours switching on and off flights from Kansas City to Washington D.C. to San Francisco to Seoul, South Korea. 

Then, Amelia took a four-hour bus to Jeonju, South Korea, where she spent the next six weeks of her summer break in a small classroom learning Korean, making the 25-hour long travel day worth it.

“We were taking language classes for eight hours a day while we were [in South Korea],” Amelia said. “And we would do cultural exchange. We visited Seoul as well as some other major cities.”

During the summer of 2023, Amelia traveled to Jeonju, South Korea for a language immersion trip, which she found out about through a KC-based student diplomacy program called Global Ties. 

The previous summer, she had traveled to Japan for a shorter two-week trip, which was funded by her school at the time, in Oregon.

Amelia’s classes were held in an all-boys christian school in South Korea, separate from the Korean students, alongside 20 other students from the United States, all learning to read, write and hold conversations in Korean.

Amelia hopes to use her experience with foreign languages, cultures and countries to go into diplomacy, and work specifically in East Asia.

According to Amelia, since everyone in her classes was a beginner, they were split into groups of seven, so they could have smaller groups to focus on practicing content

Although she was still new to the language, Amelia spent hours in the weeks leading up to her trip studying and familiarizing herself with the Korean writing system.

“She’s always saying how interesting [Korean] is, because it’s very easy to learn,” Amelia’s sister, junior Lola Stinson said. “It was made to be very easy to learn, and the shapes of the symbols are representative of the shapes that your mouth makes while you say them.”

Unlike her trip to South Korea, Amelia’s trip to Japan emphasized Japanese culture, over just learning the Japanese.

“[The Japan trip] was lighter overall,” Amelia’s mom Stacy Dunn said. “When she came back from [it] she was on cloud nine. Now the Korean trip, she was excited about, but she was way more tired, since there was a lot more work on it.”

Amelia spent more time experiencing Japanese culture firsthand, instead of just sitting in a classroom and being told about it.

“Not talking loudly, especially in public places is really important,” Amelia said. “Respect in general is a really big deal.”

Amelia’s first stop in Japan was the city of Ogaki – about five hours west of Tokyo and Kumamoto – a city on the Island of Kyushu. She also spent a couple of days in Tokyo without a host family, in order to experience the culture of bigger Japanese cities, that are far more cramped with tens of millions more than your standard American city.  

“In Japan, it was mostly just a cultural exchange,” Amelia said. “We would visit local high schools and temples and just experience their cultures.”

Amelia plans to travel abroad to Taiwan, to learn more Mandarin after high school to better her chances of becoming a diplomat in the future.

“[Traveling abroad] just kind of lit a flame in her, she wasn’t really aware that was an option,” Amelia’s dad James Stinson said. “Once she got some exposure to the whole idea, and had some diplomats come and talk to [her] I think she saw something that really just spoke to her.”