Korean language learning via K-pop

K-content helps foreigners learn Korean

By Mark Peterson

Recently on my YouTube channel, I recorded an interview with a “K-pop” Korean language student. I was asked by the National Institute of Korean Language to make a video to investigate the way the Korean language is being studied and learned by Americans.

The student was one I discovered serendipitously through my physician, who during my last yearly physical mentioned that his high school daughter was crazy about learning Korean. So, I contacted her and asked if I could interview her about her study of Korean. She happily agreed.

In the interview I found that it was true — she was studying Korean through K-pop and dramas. And it was her mother who got her started as the mother would mimic the Korean actors as they would say, “Sarang haeyo” (I love you) or other phrases. The mother would say new phrases that she was picking up from the drama and the daughter thought it was fun to do, so she started doing it, too. Then she got serious — they both got serious. The mother ordered a picture dictionary of Korean words, and they got onto Duolinguo to “learn the alphabet” and then the daughter enrolled in an online university language course. So far, she has completed three units. Thus , a young woman, a high school student, has become a student of Korean.

My interview with her was delightful. She was very mature for a high school student, yet some things she said would remind me that she was still quite young, but in other ways, she was as mature as a college student or even a college graduate. Her eyes would twinkle when she would speak of the characters in her favorite dramas, and she loved showing off the Korean she had learned.

I asked her if she had confidence in using honorifics, and she didn’t know the word “confidence” — “jashin.” And a few sentences later, she used the word as she responded to another question. Bright young student!

She is only one of hundreds, maybe thousands of young students who are learning Korean through K-pop, dramas and music. Enrollments in Korean language courses across the country are climbing dramatically. So dramatically that Korean is the only major growth language in America (well, American Sign Language is also growing, but only modestly). All other languages are suffering enrollment decline all across America — Spanish, French, German, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese — all of them are in decline.

The need, or perceived need, to learn a language is being eclipsed by the rise of technology. Why learn a language, sweat, suffer and spend endless time and mental energy to learn a language when your phone has an app that can do bilingual translation for you? Your phone, and other dedicated machines, can listen to a foreign language phrase, and translate it into English for you. And you can speak English into the phone and ask it to translate the statement or question into any number of other languages. So, why study a foreign language?

Well, one reason is to develop your brain. Studies have shown that bilingualism and foreign language study improve I.Q. and intellectual ability. There is a positive connection between learning a foreign language and other brain activities, even unrelated activities.

And my young interviewee was certainly intelligent. She had just returned from Houston, Texas, where she had competed in a pre-med student competition with students from around the nation and the world — and she took second place in the contest! Whether learning a second language makes you smarter, or whether you study a foreign language because you are smarter is a kind of the chicken-or-the-egg question — but the answer, regardless, is that there is a connection.

Another student has told me that his success in learning Korean is because he was young enough to learn Korean as a child — meaning, in his terms, that his brain still had the plasticity, or child-like power to absorb a new language the way children learn language — by simply listening and speaking.

And this is certainly the key to success in learning Korean these days; students begin in a natural way by living the language of the characters in a drama, and in the songs they listen to. Students come into university courses these days with confidence and the ability to understand and speak in ways unlike their predecessors. There are occasional gaffs — students, not understanding honorifics, will sometimes speak to their professors in inappropriate ways, but that only elicits a healthy, but awkward laugh, and a moment of learning ensues: “You can’t speak to an older person using that kind of language.” And the teacher shows the proper way to speak in that situation and language is learned. And it’s a lot of fun! It is more fun than speaking into your phone to be your translator.

Mark Peterson ([email protected]) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.