Page 10 - Blog 2015 - Korea in Canada

KoREa In Canada
KoREa-Canada Blog 2015

How to Become fluent in

Korean

by Samuel Gendreau (Ottawa, ON)

’ve been learning Korean for the better part of the past 7 years, and in 2014, I became the
igrand Prize Winner of the first KBS World Korean Speaking Contest. The contest saw
applicants from 44 countries around the world showcase their Korean skills through three
rounds of elimination. as the grand Prize Winner, I was invited to spend a week in Seoul
in September 2014, where I participated in various broadcasting events, including on national
radio, to showcase my knowledge of the Korean language and culture.

So how did I manage to reach a relatively high level of spoken fluency in Korean, and
how can you do it too? If I were to reduce the “secret” to 2 words, it would boil down to
motivation and technique. Motivation, because Korean, after all, is ranked by the Foreign
Service Institute of the US department of State as one of the hardest languages to learn for
native English speakers (along others such as Japanese and Mandarin Chinese). This means
that learning Korean is a considerable investment of time and effort, so you'll need to be in
this for the long-run. You'll inevitably go through motivation peaks and troughs, but what's
important is not to give up and to keep progressing. and finally technique, because even
you do manage to keep going for a long period of time, you'll need to have the right tools
in your toolkit to avoid plateauing and to improve your skills to a fairly high level. But
beyond this, how exactly do you go about learning Korean?

In this article, I’m going to guide you through the exact steps I would recommend you
to go through to begin learning Korean from scratch, and to eventually reach a high level of
proficiency in it. I’m not going to tell you it’s easy, but it is, without an ounce of a doubt,
absolutely worth it. Enjoy the post, and if you find it useful or interesting in any way, please
share it!

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