My Korean Language Learning Journey
My Korean language journey didn’t start because I wanted to learn Korean, it was a pure accident. One fine day, I was browsing on my Netflix profile and looking for a good Japanese drama. Then I stumbled upon what seemed to be one. The title didn’t exactly sound Japanese, but that didn’t stop me from clicking the play button anyway. The dialogues sounded really different. I then saw that the series was in Korean. The story was so good that I binged about five to six episodes in one go. That is how I started watching K-dramas.
At first, it was really hard for me to follow the story along with the subtitles. Over time, I started familiarizing myself with the “melody” of the language. Then I started to understand the meaning of the words that appeared the most often and connected those to the subtitles. With this method, I began to comprehend quite a lot of words. My vocabulary range gradually increased and soon enough, I was able to understand simple sentences. Since a lot of K-dramas would feature everyday conversations quite frequently, I started making a structure of the possible expressions that could be used in that situation.
At that point, I had watched around 60 to 70 K-dramas. Whenever I went out, I would keep my eyes and eyes open and look for people who were speaking Korean. I would either listen to their conversation and try to understand what they were saying or I’d muster the courage to go and have a conversation, albeit a brief one. My first conversation was with a woman who ran a Korean restaurant. The second one was with two elderly ladies on their way back to Zurich from a hiking trip in Lugano. That was the first time that I was able to understand nearly 90% of what the ladies were saying. It was also the first conversation where I didn’t use English or German. The ladies were really surprised and both of them encouraged me to continue learning.
Although I have been learning passively, I’ve absorbed so many expressions like a sponge. I believe that the way I learnt/am learning Korean is definitely a great way to learn a new language while having fun.
