It’s always surprises me when fellow language learners say they feel like a “different person” when they speak in a non-native language. When people ask me if I feel like I have a different personality when I speak Korean, my answer has always been no. If you’re learning a new language as an adult — at least, past the “optimal” age to acquire a language — how much of your self can truly be affected by the language? The culture and language of your family and the society you spend your day-to-day life in has so much a firmer hand in shaping you. I doubt that even study-abroad programs or other ..read more

This is the post in which I should be telling you, it’s over. I’m no longer studying Korean. It’s time to shut down this blog. Except, I can’t. I won’t! One, because I’ll never not be studying Korean. When you’re ten years into a language, it becomes part of your identity. It’s not so much a hobby as it is a practice. I may not be recording how many hours I study everyday or constantly checking out new textbooks and resources or studying for TOPIK as most of the language learning internet community seems to be doing these days, but part of my brain is always thinking about something related to ..read more

In one way or another, we made it to December 2020, which means we’re in the season of reflection, resetting, and re-ignition of the old and new. Over the years, I’ve seen more and more people setting goals to learn a new language, to get some score on some language exam, or otherwise attain a level of proficiency in their language(s) of choice. The language learning community outdoes itself in performative goal-setting, with pastel Instagram shots of new planners and textbooks, twitter threads, YouTube videos. Even as a person who’s studied Korean for a decade and counting now, the publicizin ..read more

The last post I wrote was my 200th post on this blog, across nine years of blogging and ten years of studying Korean. Every once in a while, I’ll check the Related Posts section under a recent post and be surprised that I wrote about a certain topic. Over the years I’ve gone back and set some of my older posts to private because I thought it didn’t fit the image of what I wanted this blog to be or what it was becoming. Sometimes I’ve edited language and tone–it’s a weird, interesting kind of dissonance, knowing that past me was me but also not me as I am now. (I don’t know how much I love havi ..read more

A couple month ago, I wrote about how invested I’d become in Korean webtoons. If anything, I’ve become even more invested in recent months, after starting my part-time freelancing gig with Lezhin. From a language-learning standpoint, this is actually great because aside from webtoons, I read mostly academic essays and literary fiction in Korean so, uh, I don’t have a great grasp on how conversational Korean sounds. I have no idea what idiomatic phrases or colloquial expressions are commonly used, much less slang; webtoons have helped me learn more about that world. I also lurk in the comments ..read more

What can I say that hasn’t already been said? It is April 2020, and we are in the midst of a global pandemic. I’d been paying attention to the virus since December, mostly out of an academic interest (in a former life, I was a graduate researcher in the field of immunology), but I still didn’t worry about Covid-19 as much as I did seasonal influenza. When the virus hit Seoul in full force, I checked in with my friends in Korea and started to keep an eye on the news, but my life in California continued uninterrupted. I’d started the new decade with surprising momentum. I was in an essay writing ..read more

When I think of my evolving relationship with Korean pop culture, I think I will remember 2019 fondly as the year I committed myself to Korean webtoons. Webtoons are online-first original comics optimized for mobile consumption. (There’s an interesting article that came out earlier this year contrasting webtoons to Japan’s print-first manga culture.) A number of content platforms publish webtoons, but I’ve stuck exclusively with Naver, for no good reason except consistency; I’ve been using Naver for all Korean-related things (news, dictionaries, and its online translator, Papago) for years. In ..read more

I’ve been writing this post on and off since February this year, ever since I finished reading 흰: The Elegy of Whiteness by Han Kang, and here we are, finally. 흰 (English title: The White Book) is the third book I’ve read by Han Kang, and the first I’ve read in the original Korean. A few years earlier, I had picked up Han’s Booker Prize-winning work 채식주의자 (The Vegetarian), mainly out of a curiosity for the novel’s British translator, Deborah Smith, who had only begun learning Korean seven years prior to the book’s publication. Reading The Vegetarian was a milestone in my literary (?) Korean jo ..read more

We recently got back from a trip to Tokyo, and half of my heart is still there. This was my third time in Japan and Theo’s sixth; between the two of us, we’ve explored most of the touristy metropolitans on Honshu, so we were content to just stay put in Tokyo, visiting museums and parks, eating soft serve, and making late-night trips to Family Mart. Sunset over Setagaya Park. People are always surprised when they find out that I keep going back to Japan though I only know the most basic of conversational Japanese, and yet I’ve only been to Korea once despite being fairly fluent in Korean (going ..read more

This is a follow-up to a popular post I wrote over SIX (gasp?!) years ago. My Korean vocabulary (much as I complain how lacking it is) has increased over the years, which means, yep, more Korean words I wish existed in English. To be fair, I’ve come to dislike articles that say some word from another language is so unique and untranslatable, just because English doesn’t have an exact equivalent word. A good translation isn’t a one-to-one mapping of words; it tries to capture the meaning, voice, tone, and context of the original work. So: this is a list of Korean words that could very ..read more