Maru Academy / Questions
Questions people actually ask me
Two kinds, mostly. Whether they can learn the language, and what Korea is really like. Here are honest answers to both — the ones I’d give you on a call, not the ones that sell best.
About learning Korean
Most of these are asked by people deciding whether to start at all.
No — not in the way people mean. The alphabet takes about a week; it was designed to be learnable, and that part is genuinely easy.
What’s hard is something nobody warns you about: within a few months you’ll understand far more than you can say. That gap is where almost everyone stops, and it isn’t a difficulty problem. It’s a practice problem, and it has a fix.
Depends what you mean by conversation. Ordering, asking for directions, small talk with a shop owner — a few months, if you’re speaking out loud from week one.
Talking about your day, your opinions, a disagreement — that’s a year or more of real use, not study hours. The people who get there fastest aren’t the ones who study most. They’re the ones who started speaking before they felt ready.
Yes. It’s the one thing I won’t talk anyone out of.
Romanization feels faster for about two weeks, then it quietly caps you — you end up pronouncing Korean with English mouth habits and you can’t read anything real. Learn Hangul in week one, keep romanization as a bridge, and drop it. In my books it fades out entirely by month three, on purpose.
Because listening and speaking are different skills, and almost everything you’ve been doing trains the first one.
Dramas, apps, textbooks, videos — all input. Speaking only improves by speaking, out loud, with someone who corrects you kindly and immediately. If this is the question you came here with, it’s the one my whole method is built around.
Course if you’re starting from zero, or you want to build the foundation on your own schedule. It’s the cheaper, slower, entirely self-directed path, and it works.
1:1 if you already know more than you can use, or if the thing stopping you is other people hearing you. You can also do both — most of my coaching students are working through a course between sessions.
You can learn a lot — and if that’s what made you want Korean, don’t let anyone make you feel unserious about it. It’s the best motivation there is.
But two things: drama Korean is often 반말 between close friends or dramatic register you’d never use with a stranger, and watching is input. You’ll build a big passive vocabulary and a mouth that’s never practised. Use dramas for ear and motivation. Get your speaking somewhere else.
No. Learn one polite ending — 해요 — and you can speak to almost anyone in Korea without ever being rude.
Honorifics matter, and they’re worth getting right eventually, but they’re the last 20% and people treat them like the first. Nobody is offended by a foreigner speaking careful 해요. They’re pleased you tried.
I’ve heard this from teachers with twenty-five years in the classroom and from people who speak four languages already. It’s almost never true, and it’s usually a memory of being corrected badly by someone.
Adults learn differently, not worse. You’re better than a child at patterns, structure and self-correction; you’re worse at not caring how you sound. Only the second one is the real problem, and it’s fixable.
Eventually, and it’s easier than it looks — the keyboard is laid out consonants-left, vowels-right, so it makes sense within a day or two.
Do it earlier than feels necessary. The moment you can type, you can text real people, and texting is the cheapest speaking practice that exists.
The courses here are for speaking, so on their own, not reliably — they are not built around the test and I would rather say so than sell you one.
TOPIK has its own line: a plan for your level and your date, a monthly mock test so you can see the score move, and four weeks of 1:1 before the test if you want them. Start with the plan — it is free, and it will tell you if your target is realistic.
Yes, and it’s one of the three things I teach on purpose. Emails, meetings, the register your Korean counterpart is expecting, and the parts of a business conversation that aren’t language at all.
I came from investment banking and venture capital, so this is the vocabulary I actually worked in.
About Korea
Asked by people coming for a week, and by people moving here.
Enough that you’ll be fine, and less than the internet implies. Signs, subway and menus in tourist areas — yes. A taxi driver, a market stall, a small restaurant at 9pm — often not.
The real gap isn’t comprehension, it’s willingness. Plenty of Koreans read English well and are anxious about speaking it, which is a feeling you may recognise. Ten phrases from you changes the entire tone of the exchange.
Yes, and this is the thing visitors are most surprised by — people leave a laptop on a café table to go to the bathroom and it’s still there.
The things to actually watch for are ordinary ones: drinking culture that escalates faster than you expect, and taxi scams at 2am near Hongdae or Itaewon. Not danger. Just friction.
Barely. Korea is close to cardless — card or phone works in almost everything, including street-food carts and buses.
Keep a small amount for traditional markets and older places, and get a T-money card on day one for subway and buses. That’s the one piece of physical infrastructure worth having.
Less than you fear, and different from what you’d guess. Nobody minds that you don’t know the etiquette — you’re visibly a guest.
The ones that register: pouring your own drink when someone older is at the table, taking something handed to you with one hand, sticking chopsticks upright in rice, being loud on public transport. Tipping isn’t rude, just genuinely not done — leaving money can create confusion rather than goodwill.
The most Korean word there is, and the hardest one to translate. Roughly: reading the room — noticing what people haven’t said and adjusting before they have to say it.
It’s why the same sentence can be perfectly fine at one table and wrong at another. You don’t need it as a visitor. You need it if you’re going to work here, and it’s most of what separates fluent-sounding Korean from correct Korean.
Because Korean grammar has to know. The verb ending changes depending on the relationship, so age isn’t small talk — it’s the information needed to speak to you at all.
It stops feeling intrusive the moment you understand it’s a grammatical question, not a personal one.
It used to be. It isn’t now — 혼밥 (eating alone) is completely normal, and much of the city is built for it: counter seats, single-portion sets, order screens.
A few places built around shared grills or stews still assume two people. Not a rule, just a menu design.
Honestly, none. You can have a great week in Seoul with zero Korean.
You’ll have a different trip with about thirty phrases. Not a smoother one — a different one, where people talk to you. That’s the whole reason I built a pocket guide instead of a phrasebook.
For the job, sometimes not — there are English-speaking roles, especially in tech and international teams.
For everything around the job — the lunch, the messages in the group chat, the thing that gets decided before the meeting — yes. That’s usually the part people underestimate, and it’s why the people who move here end up in my coaching about six months in.
No, and it’s much less of a problem than it was ten years ago. “I don’t drink” is accepted at almost any table now.
What’s still true is that a lot of relationship-building happens at dinner. You don’t have to drink. It helps to stay.
Not a tour. A day with me: contemporary Seoul, the older city around the palaces, or a night out in Hongdae — depending on what you’re curious about. Filmed, so you keep it.
I take individuals, small groups and companies.
Still deciding?
The two ways in, and me, if neither of them is the answer.