When I started learning Korean I didn’t keep a blog. The first few months I didn’t even keep a journal. After seven months I started to keep a journal in a Google Docs document so that I could keep track of my progress and strategize about ways to learn language and culture better. Only a year and a half later did I finally start this blog.

A few days ago I found this old journal. It was very encouraging (for me) to read about the tripping and failing, the detours, discouragements (and successes!) that marked the the beginning portion of my road to Korean fluency. In the beginning I primarily used the Growing Participator approach to language learning — so it’s cool to see how I progressed from one phase to another. I also detail different ways I built communities of practice and tried to participate more and more in the culture (rather than just learning the language in a surgical sense).

There was no real reason to keep the journal private so I edited out a few names and private information and uploaded them as back-posts to this blog. You can find them by clicking on the Old Diary category on the side of the blog or just clicking them here. Perhaps they will be an encouragement (and useful) to others on their language journey as they have been to me.