Ten days ago, I made a decision to challenge myself and try to learn a COMPLETELY foreign language.

I’ve always enjoyed language and took German and Spanish in high school, but for some reason that escapes me now, gave them up when I moved into Year 9 and took my GCSE options. If I could do that time again I would have opted for ALL the language and continued it into higher education, but we live and learn right? … literally.

I’ve had Duolingo – the free language learning app – sitting dustily in the background of my phone for literal years, and occasionally jumped on from time to time to learn a little more German here and there, but it never stuck.

I’ve always been interested in Asian languages and culture, but have always been intimidated by them, for several reasons, mainly being that my very English brain couldn’t get around the concept of a “writing system”, as in Chinese and Japanese, as opposed to an alphabet, but then I discovered Korean.

I’ll be completely honest here, because hell it’s my blog and honestly who is actually reading this? I have also recently discovered K-pop and specifically bands like BTS and BLACKPINK have inspired me to challenge myself, if nothing else but to understand a little more of what they’re saying in the non-English lyrics of the music they produce.

So I took the decision to try and learn Korean, first and foremost starting with the Korean alphabet, Hangul and in the short time I’ve been studying, I have filled 82 pages of an A4 notebook, with notes and characters and pronunciations solely about the Hangul alphabet.

I haven’t even started delving into the complexity of the grammar, sentence structure or actually trying to speak Korean yet, but honestly I’m enjoying the learning process so much that I can’t wait to get there, and I’m sure I’ll fill countless notebooks and go through many-a highlighter before my journey with this amazing language has finished.

This is almost certainly going to become a series, so come along with me on my journey to learn a brand new language, and the pitfalls I’ll no doubt encounter while exploring a whole new skill.