IPYG Seoul East : Korean Language class.

It is been a quite long time since the term ‘Korean wave’ was formed and now it is familiar to us. At the beginning it was about pop culture like Korean drama and K-pop, but it now embraces wider range; Korean made product, tourism, food, administration and so on. Korean wave spread from neighboring countries like Japan, China and Southeast Asia through SNS and Youtube mostly based on digital infrastructure, to whole world including Europe and America.

To global family Korea might have been just ‘only divided country in the world’ even whose name was confusing with North Korea. However, today if someone doesn’t know PSY’s Gang-nam Style, he or she must be an alien.

As Korean wave grow up and divers industry is being exported to the world, Korean language and its letter Hanguel are becoming popular too. Middle and high school, universities all over the world are opening Korean classes and also students who enter for TOPIK(Test of Proficiency in Korean) is increasing rapidly. Related institutes that were hard to be found few years ago are now having difficulty in recruiting Korean instructor as its demand goes up.

Many institutes and organizations running Korean class introduce Korean culture and heritages to foreigners, so that they can learn about old Korea better as well as new, digital Korea by experiencing traditional food and games, visiting historic sites etc. 

Therefore teaching Korean couldn’t be just teaching language or letter, but promoting our pure emotion and spirit inherent in our culture, and the teachers are working as a cultural mission too.

Learning other language and letter can be a channel of sharing and communicating between peoples from different cultures. Knowing each other will make us deeply understand what difference means and acknowledge the difference. I hope that although our these communication and reconciliation are made at an individual level, it will lead a big movement, ultimately PEACE, like butterfly effect. Peace together, isn’t it more meaningful?