My Story: Zero to Working in Korean Companies

At first, I was very confident because someone said that Korean was "easy"...

I just went to a bookstore at Seoul Station and bought my first textbook for learning Korean. I got back to my small Airbnb, opened the book, and started learning the alphabet. After a few hours of trying, I realized that I hit a wall with the alphabet. The thing that made me give up on self-learning was the two kinds of "o" in Korean—I just couldn't grasp the difference. The consonants also seemed like a nightmare... I gave up for a few weeks, and then when I went back to China (I was a foreign student in China and used to travel to Korea quite often, using up all my part-time job savings), I enrolled in Korean classes in Chinese...

Yes, my first classes for learning Korean were in Chinese, and I wasn't even fluent in Chinese back then. I went through a 3-month course and learned a crazy lot but... forgot a lot after just a few weeks... I decided not to learn Korean and Chinese at the same time and temporarily gave up on learning Korean again. I did try self-study again and failed because the language was too complex and too different from what I was used to. (I tried video courses and realized they were just a form of "smart entertainment.")

So... my first year of learning Korean was half-wasted with no results... But that's not where the story ends... As I mentioned, my first year of learning Korean was almost wasted; the progress was too slow and almost invisible. I was still struggling with creating simple sentences and couldn’t hold a real conversation. That’s when I realized I needed to stop relying solely on self-study and go all in by enrolling in a serious program.

By chance, the book I’d been using in China to learn Korean was a Chinese version of the Yonsei University textbook. So, I thought, "Why don’t I just go directly to Yonsei University to learn Korean?" And that’s exactly what I did. I put all my one-year savings into a 5-week summer program at Yonsei University that ended up changing my life. The program was far from perfect because there was little opportunity to speak Korean during classes—it was mostly listening and being immersed in the language environment. I also ended up surrounded by Americans, so I found myself in an English-speaking bubble, making it almost impossible to practice Korean at the university. However the strength of that program was its structure and clear progression: it provided a solid process for mastering specific grammar patterns and vocabulary, which allowed me to absorb a lot of knowledge in a short period. However, the reason why this program led to major success wasn’t because of what happened in the classroom. It was because of what I did outside of classes.

I kept pushing myself outside of the English-speaking bubble and started interacting with Koreans as much as I could during those months. I didn’t feel I’d made any significant progress immediately after finishing the program, but a couple of weeks later, I suddenly found myself on a two-hour date speaking only in Korean. I couldn’t believe it—it felt like a complete transformation. After about a month, I became fully conversational in Korean, making friends, going on dates, and holding long conversations entirely in Korean. It wasn’t just because of the 5-week course, or just because of my self-study, or only because of my daily practice speaking with Koreans. The real key was the combination of ALL those things coming together as a “perfect system” that allowed me to become conversational in just three months.

In June 2018, I was a beginner who could barely hold a 5-minute conversation; by September, I could speak for hours. It was a huge contrast to how I had wasted so much time on ineffective approaches before. So that’s my story.

A year later, I was already taking job interviews in Korean, and within another year, I was handling business meetings and writing professional emails in Korean.

Fast forward to today—I’ve worked in Korean companies for 2+ years, and I’m now fluent and confident, not only in everyday conversations but also in professional settings.

The takeaway from this story is that there’s a slow way to learn and a fast way, and we get to choose which path we take. There’s no magic pill, but there IS a “perfect combination” of techniques that I’ve developed to help people master difficult languages faster without wasting years.