Hi! I’m Archana. I’m a Korean-English translator, writer, and general appreciator of language and words.

This blog came about because I accidentally started teaching myself Korean, a little over a 10 years ago. I say accidentally because I was teaching myself Japanese at the time, but then fell in love with the sound of spoken Korean after watching (of all things) a B-rated horror movie. So then I started looking up the Korean words and phrases I kept hearing, learned Hangeul in the process, and eventually stumbled upon the (then brand-new!) Talk To Me In Korean podcast.

Back in the day, blogs were a thing in the language-learning community, so I created this little space for myself in February of 2011. My older posts (please don’t read them) are about learning Korean, enjoying Korean entertainment, travel, and interesting cultural and historical tidbits. There’s a smattering of Japanese thrown in there too.

I still love learning new languages, but my interests have shifted more toward translation. I’m fascinated by the space between Korean and English, and how translation can fill that space, birthing something new and breathing. I like nerding out about Korean poetry and literature, Korean internet slang, as well as Korean linguistics and language acquisition.

At my full-time job, I’m a learning designer at an analytics software company in Silicon Valley. That’s a pretty cool job, too.

Thanks for stopping by! 👋🏽

— Archana
(last updated: October 15, 2020)