The beginning

This is the story of how I began to learn Korean. When I first started, I was struck by the lack of Korean learning resources. My library had one Korean textbook and two Korean dictionaries. The local bookstore had two Korean phrase books. Online, there was tons of information about learning Japanese, but only a fraction of the same amount covering Korean. I hope that you will find some of the resources I've gathered to be useful.

My first exposure to Korean media was the movie "100 Days with Mr. Arrogant," which I watched on a whim in spring 2008. At the time I knew little about Asian cultures (except extensive knowledge of feng shui). I felt like the movie was over-the-top and goofy, and I was very unaccustomed to the non-Western film style. Still, I enjoyed it and filed it away in my brain as a fun, foreign romantic comedy.

During the 2008-2009 school year, my Japanaphilic friend and I watched some anime. That spring, I saw "Hana Yori Dango" (a very enjoyable Japanese drama, with two seasons and a movie too). As it turns out, there's also a Korean remake and a Taiwanese remake. Just for fun I watched the first episode of the Korean version after I finished HYD. After becoming so accustomed to Japanese audio, it struck me that the Korean dialogue sounded... messy. It seemed they slurred a lot together, with awwww's and ohhhh's and lots of ch/j/ts sounds mixed in there. I thought that it didn't sound too pretty in comparison to the clean, distinct sounds of Japanese.

For quite a while I toyed with the idea of learning Japanese, but I couldn't get over the 2,000+ kanji (Japan-ified Chinese characters) that I would need to learn. I was unwilling to learn spoken Japanese yet be functionally illiterate. I also couldn't think of a practical reason to spend that much time studying Japanese, since I had no plans to live in Japan.

One day I was searching job postings and found an advertisement for teaching English in Korea. Intrigued, I began to research the prospect more and found that it looked like an excellent opportunity. There are jobs in hagwons (private English conversation schools) as well as public schools and universities. Though research is necessary to prevent getting ripped off by unscrupulous employers, I decided that this was a viable possibility for after graduation.

At the same time, I remembered how one of my Korean friends had told me that Korean has a very scientific alphabet, which a smart person can learn in just a few hours. Koreans also use about 1,300 Chinese characters (hanja), but only in newspapers and some books, and usage is decreasing. So this prospect was far less overwhelming than Japanese. If I could become literate in Korean, surely I could learn the spoken part. And if I did end up teaching English in Korea, it would turn out to be quite useful. This was my train of thought up until the first day.

On this first day, I thought, "Well, it can't be that hard. I'll just learn the alphabet and see how it goes. I'll give myself one week; that should be enough. If I don't like it, I'll quit." So I found this fabulous Introduction to Korean website and began to learn the alphabet.

Hangul looks like this: 그냥 쓸데없는 생각. You group letters into syllables, which are formed by stacking letters on top of and around each other. There are rules about how consonants and vowels can be grouped together, and the sounds of many letters change depending on where they're located in the syllable or what syllables come before and after them. Yet the alphabet is surprisingly intuitive.

On the second or third day, I began to use some videos to learn correct pronunciation - specifically, the videos available on the website of BusyAtom's Learn Korean Project. I figured that he knows what he's talking about, since he's Korean. He is very personable, and his website is extremely well-organized.