Talk to Me in Korean: Son Hyun-woo
Photo by Park Minwoo
He’s been all around the world but the GIC has beckoned this well-traveled boy back home. Son Hyun-woo, a Gwangju-bred linguistic hero, master of the dance floor, blogger-extraordinaire has become somewhat of an online celebrity. His website, Talk to Me in Korean, has emerged as a forerunner in web-based language learning.
Founded in 2009 as a solution to having to answer repeated questions about common Korean expressions, TTMK has since morphed into an interactive platform where users can listen to audio lessons, download worksheets and test what they’ve learned. The free service allows students to set their own pace as they work through the curriculum. User-friendly lessons are organized into bite-sized audio clips with content ranging from learning Hangul (the Korean alphabet) to understanding dialogue spoken completely in Korean. The highly entertaining instructors present more like radio clips, making even the most unpalatable lessons on grammar and syntax easily digestible.
Son has made his way down from Seoul to speak to us about his journey through the English lexicon and how that inspired the creation of his company, Talk to Me in Korean. If you spoke to him you’d think he had lived in America for most of his life but not only has Son never lived in a foreign country, this young linguistic prodigy began learning English at the relatively late age of 17.
Though he had taken the required English classes in elementary and middle school it was never of any particular interest to him until high school. What sparked his dramatic pivot towards language learning was his first exchange with his school’s Canadian native English speaking teacher. Son found himself at a literal loss for words upon being greeted by the new teacher; all that came out of his mouth were a few Korean utterances. Embarrassment at the inability to communicate is what ultimately sparked the flame for language acquisition that would soon spread like wildfire.
“I felt ashamed,” Son said. “I wanted to prove to her that I’m better than this. That’s how it all started. I wanted to avenge this failure. I wanted to prove myself better”. He did exactly that. Son challenged himself to always have a greeting or response for his native-English teacher. Once he felt comfortable using simple phrases, he moved on to making longer sentences, then to being able to hold a conversation.
“It was like a game,” he said. This self-motivated desire to learn English is what he inherently attributes to the rapid improvement of his speaking ability. It took him only two years to go from speaking barely any English to speaking quite fluently.
In college, Son took up a new challenge, French. As sensible as this progression may seem, Son confessed, “I didn’t want to major in French. I majored in French because I was fed up with English. I didn’t feel like contributing to the development of English literature and had enough English, so there was no reason to study any more English. I wanted to look at another language.” After acquiring French, Son proceeded to learn Japanese and Spanish. Adding to his ever expanding linguistic repertoire, Son is currently studying Italian, Indonesian and Tagalog.
When asked what has been the hardest language to learn, Son’s response was “I don’t believe there is a hard language and an easy language to learn. Whatever language is out there, there are millions of speakers speaking it every day.” German, for example has been somewhat of a slow coursework for Son but that is only because he says he has no reason to learn it.
Motivation, Son firmly asserted, is the sole key to language learning. The common conception is that living abroad and being able to fully immerse oneself in the language is the key to learning a foreign language, but Son dispelled this myth as well: “I believe immersion is really key to learning a language, but I don’t believe it has to happen in that country. I’ve seen literally thousands of people who spend five years or ten years [in the United States], come back to Korea and realize they didn’t immerse themselves in the situations that they needed to speak English.” His best advice is to create situations for yourself where you have to force yourself to form comprehensible sentences.
This same confidence foddered the creation of Talk to Me in Korean. At the time, Son was a popular blogger who wrote about life in Korea. “People kept asking me the same questions, such as how to get a cheap hotel or how to ask common questions in Korean. I was sick of answering the same questions over and over again. I wanted to create a website where everything was answered. I realized I should make a Korean website run by Korean people for the purpose of helping people learn Korean—that was Talk to Me in Korean.” The fear that Talk to Me in Korean would not stand out amongst the myriad of e-learning sites was never a concern. The strong readership of his individual blog taught Son that people will always seek out and find good content. About 300,000 to 400,000 unique visitors log into TTMK, most visiting from countries where English is the primary language such as the US, UK and Australia.
Son’s website can be seen as a kind of e-Robin Hood with its philosophy of free-use and promise to keep content available without charge. This mantra makes learning Korean accessible to young learners, the curious, language dabblers and…well the just plain broke (yes, you, undergrad/grad students). Because the website hosts a wide range of visitors, including people who are older and have careers, it is able to subsist on profit generated from their online store allowing the site to be maintained as a free service.
For those wanting a bit more personal instruction, Talk to Me in Korean has a sister site, Haru Korean. Haru Korean spawned from the desire to help site users improve in an interactive manner. “We noted that so many listeners of our show practice Korean but make mistakes. We wanted to grab them and correct their mistakes,” Son explained. The only difference between the two sites is that Haru Korean allows students to get feedback on their writing samples. Since this program is more individualized the site does charge a monthly fee of $5.99. Free or fee, both sites provide a sense of community in addition to a host of language learning resources.
If contemporary psycholinguist Frank Smith is correct in writing, “One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way,” then Son is the locksmith, and he is handing out keys to everyone with access to the internet.