The last post I wrote was my 200th post on this blog, across nine years of blogging and ten years of studying Korean.
Every once in a while, I’ll check the Related Posts section under a recent post and be surprised that I wrote about a certain topic.
Over the years I’ve gone back and set some of my older posts to private because I thought it didn’t fit the image of what I wanted this blog to be or what it was becoming. Sometimes I’ve edited language and tone–it’s a weird, interesting kind of dissonance, knowing that past me was me but also not me as I am now. (I don’t know how much I love having evidence of my growing up through the years on a public blog but, hey, I guess that’s part of what I was signing up for when I started the blog in the first place!)
I was compiling a list of my top blog posts & favorites to commemorate this being number 200… but then I got, uh, lazy.
I’m always grateful and thrilled when people stumble across my little corner of the internet because this blog has always been me talking to myself, first and foremost. I don’t really see myself as a language learning content ~creator~ (which apparently is a very trendy thing to do on instagram and youtube these days), so there’s really no rhyme or reason to what I post and when I post it. And yet! There are some of you reading this right now who have been reading this for years and years, some of you who are new after happening to stumble across my more popular posts (yay SEO), who leave comments and send me messages and remind me this is where it all started. So, thank you. I don’t know if I say it enough, but thank you.
The truth is, I don’t study Korean much these days in the sense of reviewing grammar or memorizing words. But nearly every moment outside of my day job is spent doing something related to Korean. I regularly translate across a wide range of genres. I’m trying to study Korean literature and translated literature and writing as much as I can in my spare time. I read academic papers with my teacher, audit KOCW and KMOOC courses. Most of all, I try not think about how it’ll be a very, very long time until I can make my next visit to Korea.
Nice to meet you!
My uncle used ~다오 and I found you Googling what that meant. I read your post here:
https://shiningkorean.com/2012/02/06/v-%EC%95%84%EC%96%B4%EC%97%AC-%EB%8B%A4%EC%98%A4/
Will now be looking through the rest of your site to get as much knowledge as I can through you. Thank *you* for sharing your specialty knowledge.
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Thank you, Bryan! I haven’t updated or logged into my blog for a very long time, but it makes me so happy you found something useful here.
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I first read your blog several years ago and was reminded about it again years later after reading SofietoKorea’s latest blog posts about visiting Korea. I have studied Korean for about a decade now and related a lot to your post about curiosity being the main motivator for learning the language. Like you, I also don’t really “study” Korean these days but I will still try to read new articles from time to time or make note of new words and phrases I see in k dramas. I find it impressive that you still find lots of time to apply Korean in your daily life such as by translating or reading Korean literature! I myself kind of got tired of reading Korean novels haha. Anyways, just happy to find this blog again as it’s nice to find someone online who feels the same way about learning Korean.
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