Have a look around the Instagram and Twitter language learning community and you will be hard-pressed to not find an account that isn’t learning or at least interested in learning Korean.
Were you around for the Gangnam Style phase? If not, then where were you? If so, you too were sucked into the KPOP craze - whether you like it or not! Many of us sang (and danced) naively to the lyrics of Gangnam Style, not knowing what on earth they could mean, but enjoying them nonetheless. Some of us, at least at that point, may not have been completely aware of what K-pop is. So for those of you who are still unsure - what is K-Pop and what’s this craze all about?
The wave of popularity for South Korean culture is known as "Hallyu".
K-pop is short for Korean pop, which specifically originated in South Korea. In short, K-pop is a genre of music mixture of other genres, particularly rock, R&B, hip-hop, and electronic. It is the desire to learn the lyrics of K-Pop hits like Gangnam Style that has sky-rocketed the number of people studying Korean in countries like the US, Canada, Thailand, and Malaysia.
Korean is one of the hardest languages for an English speaker to learn, yet it is one of the languages that has grown the most amongst English speakers over recent decades. A report written by the Modern Language Association shows that the number of students studying Korean in the US has increased by around 14% in the years between 2013 and 2016. However, during this time the overall percentage of university students enrolling in a language course was decreasing.
Korean has seen the biggest increase in learners for any language, followed by Arabic and Japanese.
It is no surprise that language resources for learning Korean are becoming increasingly prevalent. In 2017, Duolingo launched its Korean course that quickly amassed over 200,000 learners and became their sixth most popular course.
The demand has increased so much over recent decades that the South Korean government set up a new Korean proficiency test. Before this, the only ‘proficiency test’ for Korean learners was TOPIK, however, this was only for those wishing to attend higher education in Korea. This comes as the TOPIK has been in increasingly higher demand. In 1997 online, 2,200 people registered to take the exam; today that number rests at 265,000.
The latest statistics show 14,000 students are learning Korean in the US, compared to only 163 two decades earlier.
Obviously, this comes with great economic benefits. The South Korean government has capitalised on the increase in Korean learners by founding over 170 branches of their King Sejong Institute which specialises in language learning. They teach nearly 60,000 students Korean in nearly 60 countries - an increase of nearly 40 countries since 2017.
K-pop is quickly becoming South Korea’s biggest export.
Today, the Korean boyband BTS sells out their concerts in the US and UK. They also have over 15 million followers on social media and are the first K-pop group to top the US charts.
There is even a nightclub in London that is the biggest Korean pop party in Europe - “Young Bros”. Before around 230 used to attend, now there are around 1,300. Only around 10% of these are said to be Korean and about 30% Asian.
“It’s as cheesy as the Spice Girls”
The language barrier means nothing when it comes to K-pop fans. Rather, they bond over the music than the meaning of the words.
The question that arises for me is that, is this a lesson that we can apply to other languages? The UK and US are particularly notorious for their naivety to foreign languages, so can music be the answer? K-pop certainly was for Korean.
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