Hi, I’m YeonKyung, your language friend. I teach Korean, German and Italian as foreign languages. I am from Seoul, South Korea, and I studied Germanistics (German language and culture) at Sookmyung Women’s University.

I learned my first foreign language, English, at a hakwon (a Korean after-school academy) when I was 13. I went to a foreign language high school as well, but until my first experience abroad I hardly spoke English, because our language teaching system in Korea focused on exam language, not real-life language. In high school I encountered my second foreign language, German. I still learned from the der-des-dem-den table, and my poor little brain had to figure out whether we were learning a language or an encoding system. Learned with the wrong method, both languages gave me a very hard time reaching a level where I could use them fluently in real life.

THEN! I met my third foreign language, Italian. Before I even had an Italian book in my hand, I could already communicate with Italians. I had found the real and simple way to learn a foreign language: languages are communication tools, and you learn them by communicating. It’s like riding a bicycle. You can memorize every mechanism and part of a bicycle, but that wouldn’t help you much more than sitting on the bike and actually pedaling. The bike is a riding and transporting tool, and you learn such tools only through time and by actually using them.

My Italian learning journey was just like this. I listened to a lot of daily dialogs and started to figure out alone what meant what. I started saying the words and phrases I discovered, making tons of mistakes, just like you learned your mother tongue. We learned how to speak before we knew how to sit at a desk and write our name with a pencil.

After discovering this principle, I wanted to jump into the foreign language education field, because learning languages in this era gives you many advantages and opens your eyes, and I want many people in the world to know this strength. Having other languages to speak and other cultures to learn about opens your mind not only to other cultures but also to your own people, even to yourself. I believe in the power of languages, and I am certain that we can share our love all over the world by talking to each other.

Would you like to join this journey with me? Contact me for a 30-minute free trial! I am here for you.