I've been learning Korean for three years, but my writing never seemed to improve.

So I asked for advice, and my teacher told me to keep a diary in Korean without missing a single day.

When I got home, I told my roommate, "The teacher told me to write a diary every day, even if it's just three sentences."

At first I had nothing to write, so I only noted the weather and what I had for lunch.

Little by little, I started writing about how I felt that day or conversations I'd had with friends.

Whenever I came across an expression I didn't know, I looked it up and wrote it down separately next to my diary.

After six months, I got a high score on a writing test for the first time.

Now, if I don't write in my diary, it feels like the day hasn't ended.

Since this spring, my younger brother and I have been taking Spanish lessons by video call twice a week.

Last week I missed class because I had to work late, so my brother took the lesson on his own.

That night my brother passed on the message: "The teacher said to translate the lyrics of a song we like by next class."

We picked a Latin pop song we both like, opened the dictionary, and translated it line by line.

But when we translated it using the dictionary meanings, the song didn't sound beautiful at all.

When we mentioned this in class, the teacher said that was exactly the point of the assignment.

He meant that carrying over the feelings and culture in a song matters more than each individual word.

Since then, when we read lyrics, we think first about the feelings of the person behind the words, not the words themselves.

Seoyeon studies interpreting in graduate school and volunteers at international events.

Last month, she was assigned to interpret a foreign speaker's talk into Korean at an academic conference.

The organizer said the speaker would read his script as written, so she only needed to prepare the script she'd received in advance.

But when the talk began, Seoyeon thought to herself, "They told me to just prepare the script, and now the speaker has closed it completely."

The speaker asked the audience questions and even told stories from his childhood on the spot.

Seoyeon was flustered, but she focused on following the flow of the story rather than every single word.

After the talk, the speaker thanked her, saying that thanks to her interpreting he felt he'd had a real conversation with the audience.

That day, Seoyeon learned that judgment in the moment is just as important as preparation.

I signed up for a sign language class at the district office because I wanted to communicate better with my deaf neighbor.

On the first day, as I walked into the classroom, a staff member told me in advance about a request from the instructor.

The staff member said, "The instructor says that during class you shouldn't use your voice, and should talk only with your hands and facial expressions."

At first, taking a class without speaking felt awkward and frustrating.

But I soon learned that in sign language, facial expressions are as important as hand movements.

The same hand movement could become a question or an exclamation depending on the expression.

Three months later, I chatted with my neighbor about the weather in sign language for the first time.

When my neighbor answered with a big smile, all the frustration I'd felt disappeared.

Minho's grandfather, who is over seventy, is learning to use a messaging app on his phone these days.

He used to only make phone calls, but he changed his mind after seeing his grandchildren talk by text.

But his texts were only curt replies like "Got it," so the family often mistakenly thought he was angry.

So his granddaughter suggested he try adding a smiley face at the end of each sentence.

Grandpa told Grandma, "Our granddaughter says I should always put this smiley face at the end of my texts," and started practicing.

Now his short texts always come with two or three smiley faces.

The family was surprised at how much a single picture could change the feel of the very same words.

These days, Grandpa is the first to send a good-morning message in the family group chat.

Jisoo had an English speaking interview coming up for an exchange student program.

She tends to talk fast when she's nervous, so she asked her older brother to be her practice partner.

Her brother asked her questions one at a time and recorded her answers on his phone.

When Jisoo poured out her words without a pause yet again, her brother shouted, "I told you to speak slowly and clearly!"

When she listened to the recording, even she found it hard to understand what she was saying.

From that day on, Jisoo practiced taking a breath between sentences and stressing the important words.

On the day of the interview, the examiner praised her for speaking clearly and calmly, which made her easy to listen to.

As soon as Jisoo heard she had passed, the first thing she did was text her brother to thank him.

Junho, who works at a trading company, had never been confident speaking English.

But he was put in charge of presenting a new product at a meeting with overseas clients next month.

At first he wanted to ask for an interpreter, but his team leader encouraged him to try presenting in English himself.

With his team leader insisting that he take this chance and do it himself, Junho couldn't refuse any longer.

Every day before work, he read his script aloud, and he also practiced in front of his coworkers.

He also learned that short, clear sentences work far better than perfect ones.

On the day, he got stuck a few times, but the clients listened attentively to the end.

Thanks to that experience, Junho came to believe that you improve at a foreign language by making mistakes.

Taeyun, who grew up in Busan, got a job at a customer service center in Seoul this spring.

In his first week, a senior colleague repeatedly stressed that he shouldn't use dialect on calls and should speak standard Korean.

On his way home, Taeyun muttered to himself, "What's so wrong with my hometown accent that they keep telling me to speak only standard Korean?"

Even so, he practiced every night by reading along with the news to fix his intonation.

Then one day, an elderly customer heard his accent, sounded delighted, and asked where he was from.

It turned out the customer was also from Busan, so the two of them quickly fell into an easy conversation.

When he heard about it, even his senior admitted that while standard Korean is the rule, a friendly accent can sometimes help.

Now Taeyun switches naturally between the two ways of speaking depending on the situation.

In Eunjeong's Korean class, there is one student who studies harder than anyone.

One day, Eunjeong gave the homework of memorizing a few new words each day.

A week later, the student proudly said he had memorized more than three hundred words starting from the first page of the dictionary.

But when they actually talked, he couldn't use those words in sentences.

Eunjeong smiled and said, "I never told you to memorize the dictionary in order from the beginning."

Then she explained that words stay with you longer if you learn them with example sentences, picturing situations where you'd actually use them.

After that, the student began choosing five words a day and making his own sentences with them.

He memorized fewer words, but a month later the expressions he used in conversation had noticeably increased.

Hyunwoo, who teaches Japanese at a high school, recently noticed something strange while checking homework.

Students who usually struggled with even short sentences had suddenly started using very difficult expressions.

It turned out many students had written in Korean, put it into a translation app, and copied the result as is.

In class, Hyunwoo said, "I told you to use translation apps for checking, not to have them do your homework for you."

Instead, he gave a new assignment: write sentences on your own first, then compare them with the app's version.

The students worked through the grammar themselves, finding where and why their sentences differed from the app's.

After a few weeks, the students' writing, though a bit clumsy, sounded much more like their own voices.

Hyunwoo believes it's more important to teach how to use tools properly than to ban them.

I'm an international student from Mexico, and it's now been a year since I came to Korea.

At first, my Korean friends often spoke to me in English out of consideration for me.

I was grateful, but as a result my Korean hardly improved.

So these days, even when my friends suggest we just talk comfortably in English, I stick to answering in Korean.

My answers are slow and often wrong, but my friends now wait for me and point out my mistakes.

Sometimes my friends ask me about Spanish expressions, so we teach each other.

Last week, for the first time, I chatted with my friends late into the night entirely in Korean.

I learned firsthand that you have to put up with a little discomfort for your language to improve.

I've finished a one-year course at a Korean language institute, and the completion ceremony is next week.

The students in my class thought hard about a special way to show our gratitude to the teachers.

Many ideas came up, but in the end we all agreed to sing a Korean song for them together.

As the class representative, I went to the director's office to pass this proposal on to her.

In a slightly nervous voice, I said, "The students in our class propose that we sing a song for the teachers at the ceremony."

The director smiled brightly and even set aside a classroom for us to practice in.

On the day of the ceremony, when we sang with our clumsy pronunciation, some of the teachers shed tears.

I felt truly proud that we could put a whole year's gratitude into every line of the song.

At the company where Subin works, employees from many countries work together.

Meetings are held in Korean, and the foreign employees often missed things because of fast speech and abbreviations.

So the foreign employees got together and submitted a proposal to HR to change how meetings are run.

Hearing the news, the department head asked Subin, "So how exactly do the foreign employees propose we run meetings?"

Subin explained that the proposal was to speak slowly using simple words and to write up the decisions after each meeting.

At first the Korean employees said it was a hassle, but they soon felt it helped everyone.

Trying to explain things in simple words made the Korean employees organize their own thoughts more clearly, too.

Now, holding meetings in plain language has become basic etiquette for everyone at this company.

I live in a small country village and have been studying Korean on my own for three years.

Nobody in the village knew Korean, so it was hard to find anyone who would suggest studying together.

Then one day, a notice went up on the local library's bulletin board looking for people to start foreign language clubs.

I worked up the courage and submitted an application to start a Korean club.

Two high school students who love Korean dramas and a retired teacher came to the first meeting.

We meet every Saturday morning to read Hangul and practice short conversations.

Teaching others actually helped me understand grammar I used to find confusing much more precisely.

Studying has become much more fun than when I was alone, and the club has now grown to ten members.

I love Korean dramas, but I always relied completely on subtitles.

One day, my Korean friend Haeun suggested we watch a drama together without subtitles.

At first, the dialogue was so fast that I couldn't understand even half of it, and I wanted to give up right away.

Whenever a scene confused me, Haeun paused it and explained the characters' tone and the situation.

That way, I realized that even short phrases like "Really?" or "Forget it." carry many different emotions.

Watching one episode a week for two months, I held back the urge to turn on the subtitles.

Looking back now, the drama Haeun suggested we watch without subtitles was the best listening material I could have had.

These days, I'm the one who suggests to other friends that we try watching without subtitles.

When I decided to learn Korean, what scared me most were the letters that looked like circles and sticks.

People around me also said it would take months just to memorize those letters.

But in the first class, the teacher said, "People may call them difficult letters, but once you know the principle, you can read them in a few days."

Hangul consonants are said to have been modeled on the shapes of the mouth and tongue when making each sound.

I learned that the vowels were made by combining a dot and lines representing heaven, earth, and humans.

Once I understood the principle, it was amazing that I could guess the sound of letters I'd never seen before.

In fact, within a week I was able to haltingly read the signs on the street.

Of course, understanding the meaning was another matter, but the feeling of getting over that first wall was truly special.

With a business trip to China coming up, Dohyun signed up for a Chinese conversation class at a language school near his office.

Coworkers who had taken the class before said the teacher gave lots of homework and was very strict.

So on the first day of class, Dohyun opened the classroom door feeling very tense.

But the teacher poured everyone a cup of tea and started by asking about each person's favorite food.

Dohyun thought to himself, "They said she was a strict teacher, but I never expected the atmosphere to be this relaxed."

Of course, there was as much homework as rumored, but it was all expressions he could use right away on his trip.

Even when he mispronounced things, the teacher smiled and had him repeat several times, so there was no pressure at all.

Three months later, on his trip, Dohyun was able to order food at restaurants and exchange simple greetings without an interpreter.

My eight-year-old son can't stand studying English words.

As soon as I opened his vocabulary book, he'd say his stomach hurt or he was sleepy and slip away.

Strangely, though, he only picks up the English cards on his own if I call it play rather than study.

So I made games like bingo and treasure hunts with the word cards.

I hid cards all over the house, and he got points for reading aloud the word on each card he found.

To get more points, he started asking me what unfamiliar words meant before I could tell him.

After about a month, he began to occasionally mix words from the game into everyday conversation.

I realized that if you just find the right approach for a child, learning can become a fun game too.

My mother, who turned sixty this year, is completely absorbed in studying French these days.

She says it has been her dream since she was young to go to Paris and talk with the locals herself.

But our relatives worried, saying it was too late to learn a new language at her age.

My mother laughed and said, "How can anyone call sixty too late already?"

Every morning she listens to a radio course, and in the evening she goes to classes at the local community center.

Sometimes the pronunciation frustrates her, but the handwritten sentences in her notebook grow every day.

Last month, she says, she had her first five-minute conversation with a French-born instructor.

Watching my mother, I too have come to believe that it's truly never too late to learn.

My son, who grew up in the United States, barely speaks Korean, and my mother, who lives in Seoul, speaks no English at all.

So when my mother came to stay with us this summer, I became the interpreter between the two of them.

At the table, my mother looked at her grandson and said to me, "Tell him to wash his hands before he eats."

For the first few days, every conversation between them had to go through me.

But after hearing the same words many times, before long my son started saying "I'll wash my hands" first.

My mother, too, learned short English greetings like "Good morning" from her grandson and clumsily repeated them.

After a month, the two of them could laugh together with just gestures and a few words.

On the day my mother left for Korea, my son said goodbye at the airport in Korean: "Grandma, please come again."