I love learning Korean and it inspired me to start my own company!
Hi everyone,
My name is Quan Nguyen and I'm a passionate Korean learner like yourself. I love how it sounds like music and poetry everytime I listen to it. I love how simplistic the alphabet is but how deceptively difficult the grammar is to master. I love how much emotion speaking Korean gives me. They have a word called 정 (jung) which loosely translates as "compassion" or "affection." I feel so much jung when I get to speak Korean.
But as a learner, I rarely had opportunities to practice speaking. I was living in the states when I first started learning Korean in an area with not many Korean people. I took 2 semesters of Korean in college and quickly realized that I would plateau if I didn't have a native speaker to practice speaking with. Sure, the first couple months was fun and because everything was so new, I eagerly devoured everything in sight. I listened to podcasts from TTMIK and read through the grammar tutorials from the Howtostudykorean blog (a fantastic resource for grammar junkies!). I also made flashcards, practiced vocab on Memrise, made Korean friends on HelloTalk, joined Kakao language chats. All of this got me to intermediate level but I wasn't satisfied with my progress in speaking.
My love for Korean eventually took me to Seoul, where I spent a year studying at Yonsei university, taking college classes and Korean language classes. All in total, I have spent 2 years studying Korean in school and 2 years just self-studying. However, it wasn't easy because right after college, I started working so it was difficult to make time for studying while balancing your life as an adult and working 9 to 5 lol. It's just so hard you know what I mean?
Luckily, I was working in Korea so I could practice my Korean on a daily basis with locals. However, that wasn't enough because I needed a bit more structure to really improve my Korean. I actually missed having some more guidance that I usually would get in a traditional Korean class, where you have a curriculum you can follow and a teacher that can correct your mistakes.
When you're talking with people, especially strangers, you often just repeat the same dozen korean phrases you know. It's not really improving your conversation skills.
So in 2014, I decided to create a Korean language learning platform with my best friends. I didn't want a typical classroom experience studying grammar all day and I was also tired of having random conversations with natives that lacked the academic content I needed as a Korean learner (I love grammar but natives won't go out of their way to just teach you, sometimes they don't even know how to teach proper Korean grammar).
That's why I started SAY (Seniors and Youth). It's a community of Korean learners that want to speak and practice their Korean with experienced native tutors. I'm so proud of this achievement and it has also helped me and so many other students improve their speaking skills. We started in 2014 as a project to connect Korean learners at Yale and Princeton with senior citizens in Seoul. They had weekly conversations. The students loved how they could practice their Korean with native speakers. And our seniors loved how they get an opportunity to speak with young people and share their knowledge of Korean.
We grew and grew over the past three years and have served over 100 students and seniors (who we now refer to as SAY tutors). Our teachers come from all walks of life and they have experience in teaching Korean or teaching in general. They are talented folks with a desire to have a greater purpose in their second acts of life. In fact, it was because of these seniors that I really learned to love Korean even more. I finally had people I could practice speaking in jondaemal with. The tutors also had amazing life stories to share with me and our other students.
As a non-Korean, I feel tremendous pride in knowing that I was able to start something meaningful. I am truly thankful if you have read this long post up to this point. For anyone interested in improving your Korean speaking or want to have more exposure to practicing with native speakers, you can check out our website: www.sayspeaking.com
Because I believe so much in SAY's mission, all new students get a FREE 30-minute trial when they sign up an account.
If you want to learn more about our program, I made a youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T-AlnGHxCk
And you can follow us on FB here: www.facebook.com/seniorsandyouth
Feel free to email me anytime: [email protected]
I'm always glad to help!
여러분 화이팅! 보기 하지말고 한국어를 같이 원어민처럼 말해보세요!
-Quan
