Mary is an American. She just got the good news about her application for a teaching job in Seoul. She will be flying soon after the school complete her visa application. So she reaches for the nearest bookstore and got herself a learn Korean book and scour the Internet for eveyrthing about the language to prepare for her life in Korea. When she reaches Seoul, she is excited and then settle in her new school. She realizes, her Korean needs some brushing, since she needs some level of fluency to make life easier (in school and outside) so she roles into a class. She enjoys them so much because it has been a pleasure for her to learn a new language and she can finally relate more with her Korean middle school students. She can also order any food she wants in a restaurant and ask help from the customer service centre and make friends with her colleagues. It took her a while to learn basic speaking but she is a young and lively woman who can handle that. She may or may not have time for Korean dramas but she basically doesn't need it to learn Korean. She has her work and students to keep her busy. She probably dating a cute Korean guy too. Geewiz...you can find love anywhere if its meant to be.People say watch Kdramas to learn Korean but I learn Korean to watch Kdramas, which is VERY different.
Wong is from Shanghai and is granted a scholarship to study in Korea. He goes there and spends a whole year to 1.5 years studying Korean intensively through lectures and tutorials and sits for exams. He studies very hard because he needs the fluency to later attend his actual major that is in engineering which will be conducted in Korean and he would have to submit assignments, sit exams and present in Korean. He is a smart young man and learned advance Korean and reached sufficient fluency within a year and a half. He is ready to start his degree program. No problem with life outside of univeristy as well, with his high hard work in studying Korean, which was already part of his study program.
Cinta is an Indonesion. Jiwon and her met in Australia during their studies and soon fell in love and decided to get married. Jiwon told her, they should live in Korea where he was born because there is a good job offer waiting for him. So she happily settles with his new Korean husband in Busan and with her wonderful in laws. They speak only Korean, so she takes free Korean classes offered for foreigner spouses and she picks up pretty quickly because she converses with her mom in law every day. She didn't have to go to a lot of classes after that. They soon have children who turn out to be trilingual, thanks to her loving nurture and her daily English and Indonesion language and her husband's and in laws' Korean.
Gopal is from India. He is posted to to work in a shipping yard in Ulsan. Its going to be an exciting 2 years or more, he says. He will be working in the largest shipping yard in the world and his hard work and skills has finally brought him something great for his career. It a fresh new start, so he leaves for Korea with his family and probably didn't pick up too much on the Korean language except for "kamsahamnida" and "anyonghaseyo". He soon starts work with the best engineers in Korea and all over the world and they all speak English well. His work is demanding and he doesn't have time to study a lot of Korean language, what more enroll to a class. He wish he could order food properly from restaurants so he picks up a small book for daily Korean conversation from the bookstore, with Hangeul and romanization. Stressful but fulfilling job with occasional travel around Korea, life is pretty good.
Rita is Gopal's wife and she and her toddler and baby follow him to Korea. She feels she is too busy and too old to learn Korean. She learns the basic survival phrases and the Hangeul made her dizzy. Its not because she is not smart, but she has so much to do with the home and kids. She is a dedicated wife and mom and feels that she doesn't need to learn Korean if they are only going to live there for only 2 years.
<Enter your name here> is from <Enter your country here> and live there. S/he works for a living and where s/he lives there are no Koreans or very few, and its not like s/he knows them. There may or may not be a Korean restaurant in her city but the patrons don't speak Korean. The bulgogis and kimchis aren't bad though, s/he can't tell if its better or similar to ones in Korea but they're good enough. S/he turns on the TV every Monday and Wednesday night and there is a Korean drama with a cute guy and girl. The plot gets better and s/he watches everything with the subtitles. S/he is now a Kdrama fan and the cliffhangers at each end of the episodes is enough reason for him/her to follow the series through. Ah..happy ending, luckily. The Internet have banks of seas of previous Kdrama series so s/he watches the best series, sometimes marathon style, during weekends. Pretty much no life aside Kdrama life because after the marathon, comes the Kdrama hangover.
S/he by now have picked up a lot of Korean words but still muses about a lot of that s/he still do not understand because the conversations are so fast sometimes and the lingos is not anything s/he know or hears in real life. So in her (other) free time, s/he picked up SOME Hangeul and the language, through the websites and Youtube. But really, s/he is a working person so there's not a lot of time to learn Korean from A-Z although s/he wish s/he could understand Kdramas better. The subtitles are enough but the Korean language is so special and beautiful s/he desire to learn it more, so s/he could understand at least half of what its saying. S/he realizes its a difficult language so s/he just go back to just watching. Several words and phrases come to mind but most of it are still gibberish. S/he is the confirmed Kdrama junkie everyone loves to hate and not many people around him/her understands. It can be a lonely world, we mean the real world.
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| Kdrama junkie on that sad scene. Too much onions |
Lola is a Malaysian, she was a working mom but now a housewife to her Malaysian husband in Busan. They speak English and Malay at home, in Korea. She wanted to work too, so she started picking up Korean language 4 months before their departure to Korea. At the end, it was more important to stay home and manage the home and kids because they don't have relatives where they live now and the kids needs their mom more than ever. But, in the process she found that the Korean language is so interesting that she enrolled to a day class while the kids go to school. She wanted to pass her tests so she started watching Kdramas. She gets hooked and becomes a junkie and now it turns out that Kdramas, instead of a place to learn, it has become a reason to learn. Its now a motivation for her.
Compared to the previous person (that is probably you) she has all the advantages. She has time, resources, passion, people and motivation. She is the Kdrama fan with advantage. She is not young but smart enough. She is not fluent but works to be fluent. It will take time but she can understand at least half of conversations by now because she found the shortcuts. You see, all the lessons in books, internet and traditional classroom are catered for different purposes but none of them are for the Kdrama fans. People say watch Kdramas to learn Korean but I learn Korean to watch Kdramas, which is VERY different, in my opinion.
Why? Because classes can be a crawling and daunting process. Kdrama fans listens to a mix of simple and difficult conversations all the time and in all speech levels, speeds and situation. How are we suppose to learn all those if we don't have time?
So she (okay, its me!) have only one job to do now, what I have and gathered within this 3 years, with my skills, it can only lead to this. I want to help the Kdrama fans to learn Korean faster and easier, by skipping all the unnecessary class like 'ordering food', 'shopping', 'airport' conversations and written Korean. Of course, should probably jump into daily life and romantics, which isn't normally included in lessons that I find. Maybe I could just list other reasons why I feel normal Korean lessons (online or classroom) are not made for the Kdrama fans. Click here for my post about the problems I found when learning Korean for Kdramas.
HOWEVER, when I mean short cuts, I will not cut where it is necessary to learn, like basic grammars! The language deserve some justice too! I don't care how old you are, your brain is not weak! It's just like our muscles that need to stretch and bend in the beginning. If you haven't exercised your legs for a loooong time, most definitely your legs will hurt during the first week. But the good news is, you will run without ease as time goes by.
EVEN if you are like Mary, Wong, Cinta, Gopal, Rita and for whatever reason you study Korean I still hope we can learn together and this blog can supplement you in your journey. (Prepare to not have the first thing learn as how to order food at the restaurant in this blog)
With that, we will go straight to all the list of Kdrama words and skip the unneccessary ones. And we will learn step by step grammar until we build strong enough to make out a conversation. You may need to learn speaking although you don't need to but speaking is the key to listening too.
I'm excited to start this journey with you. Please support by following me on the blog and Youtube and Facebook.
