#about studiousbees

Hello, everyone! It’s been about… one and a half? years since I started this blog, and I’m really appreciative of all the support that I’ve gotten here :) I don’t have a language-related content post for you all today, but I have been wanting to write a post just sort of letting you guys know a bit more about myself and why I’m writing this blog!

Who is StudiousBees?

I guess I’ll start with some basic bio stuff. I’m from the US, went to Canada for university, and moved to Korea almost immediately after graduating (and I’ve been here ever since then, a bit over four years ago!). I’ve loved languages ever since I was younger, and that has been a driving force in my life. I also had dreams of becoming an author or an illustrator when I was younger, but I soon realized that I only liked writing and drawing purely as a hobby and that thinking about doing either beyond hobby level just killed my motivation for them.

In university I studied East Asian studies as my major and Korean and linguistics as my minors. I’m currently an EFL (English as a foreign language) teacher, and I’m working on my M.Ed TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). If I could get into translation at some point, I wouldn’t be mad about that either :)

How many languages do you speak/have you learned (and for how long)?

I’ll just do some list action! The bolded languages are the ones I still actively use/learn:

1. English (~25 years)— native speaker :B

2. French (~7 years active, 7 years inactive)— literate. French used to be my passion. When I was a kid there was a French after school club at my elementary school and my mom signed me up for it because I asked. I don’t remember learning much at all there, but I knew I wanted to actually learn French when I got to middle school (there was that and the fact that my older sister was taking French, so I figured I could just get help from her if it was hard… in the end, I was a lot better at it than she was :B). I studied French for seven years in middle and high school and was going to major in French translation at university, but I actually ended up changing my major on the very first day of classes. Oops! I can’t really speak it anymore outside of really basic stuff, but I can still read it. I think that if I were to expose myself to more and more French and actually try to use it again, it would come back to me.

3. Korean (~7years)— fluent; been learning for a bit over seven years now. I’ve never taken the TOPIK exam, so don’t ask what I scored on it >.> Lately I mostly just maintain my Korean through talking with people, reading books, and watching Youtube videos and the news. The death of my French is Korean's fault :B

4. Spanish (1 year)— skills non-existent (except a bit of reading). I shouldn’t even count this; I just had six credits to burn my last year of uni and decided to take Spanish. I didn’t really like the class, but I didn’t find it too hard since it was very similar to French. Not too interested in getting back into this one.

5. Mandarin (~2 years)— basically conversational? Semi-conversational? I’m not sure how I’d call this one >.> I can have conversations fairly easy with people online and I can read simple books, but at the same time, my speaking and listening need some work. The on-off nature of my study of Mandarin has made it hard for me to pinpoint exactly how long I’ve been studying it, but I’ve decided to put the official start of my studies at October 2015 since that’s when I bought my first Mandarin textbook from Taiwan and really started going hard.

6. Japanese (~1.5mo)—VERY basic. I remember when I was younger, maybe middle school age, I wanted to try learning Japanese. I bought a book on it, but all the introductory stuff at the start of the book, talking about weird and crazy things like particles had me so confused that I wasn’t able to get very far. If you’ve been following this blog since (near) the beginning you’ll know that I was studying Japanese then, a year and a half ago. However, I quickly dropped it because I couldn’t handle studying both beginner Japanese and beginner Mandarin at the same time. So, I left it alone for a few months, and I only recently got back into it. I was surprised to find that, other than fairly decent recognition of Hiragana and Katakana, I had pretty entirely forgotten anything, so I don’t feel cheaty saying that my real Japanese study started only a short while back. I feel like I’m progressing fairly quickly though, especially since I’m making sure to study it every day and use it on language exchange sites, even if I’m just having the same conversation about the weather a thousand times.

Why did you make this blog?

I started this blog primarily because I wanted to encourage myself to study more. At the time I started it, there were a lot of people I follow on my main account that were doing 100-day challenges and things like that, and I was made very aware of how much I had slacked off. I thought that if I entered into such a challenge and documented my study in a public way, I would feel more drive to study. I never did stick with the whole 100-day challenge concept, but I did stick with studying every day!

My grammar posts started from my wanting to mentally consolidate and keep track of grammar I had studied. One of the best ways to make sure you know something is to try to teach it to someone else, so that’s what I did. Those posts were very well received, and I really liked writing that sort of stuff (and still do!) so it took off. Then I added in book reviews, Hanja posts, and app reviews as more people starting following me and asking me questions and all. I was so surprised that people were actually looking up to me ㅠㅠ <3 My blog literally would not be what it is now without all of the input and questions from you guys, so thanks!

Any questions??