Korean language status

For basically my whole life, I wished I could speak Korean better.

I want to speak Korean because most of my extended family, except for some cousins who grew up in America, only speak Korean. Also, I often meet friends of friends who only speak Korean. I think things would be a lot more interesting and easier if I only spoke Korean better.

Furthermore, changes in my immediate family are providing even more motivation to get better at Korean. My retired mom is now spending more and more time in Korea. It would be great to visit her there. I've only ever seen her in America, so I'd love to see her totally comfortable in her mother-land.

My wife has also expressed interest in spending long periods of time going to Korea. As a child, she would spend her summers in Korea - which is why her Korean skills vastly outpaces mine. If we have kids, she's always said that she would like to expose them to both Korean and American culture, and for them to be bilingual.

I've always resisted the idea of spending more time in Korea, in part, because of my weak Korean skills. I think it would be lame of me to deprive my unborn children of a great multi-cultural experience because of my lack of skills. So, it's about time for me to get better at Korean.

In the past, I've done the following things:

• I listened to Talk to Me in Korean podcasts.
• I wrote flashcards and studied them with the Anki android app.
• I tried to watch some Korean movies and dramas on Netflix. Some recent ones were New World and You're all surrounded.
• Years ago, I also took a class an beginner/intermediate Korean class in college.

but all of these things haven't really gotten me to the fluency level that I'd like.

I think the gigantic ingredient that I am missing from my studies is real conversation practice. To get that practice, I will try out lessons from iTalki. I've signed up for my first lesson with a native Korean speaker. My plan is for my teacher and I to role play (he'll pretend to be my uncle or cousin in law or friend's wife ...), so that I can be exposed to lots of different kinds of situations. I'm really hopeful that this will immensely improve my skills.

iTalki also has a platform where you can write stuff in Korean, and others will comment and correct your writing. I posted something yesterday, and I got a correction in less than a day. It was pretty awesome to get good quick feedback from a native Korean speaker. I think I will take advantage of this more in the future, but I'll have to work on my Hangul (korean alphabet) typing skills. I guess that's just one more thing I have to work to improve on ...

Shameless request time ...

If you do plan on using iTalki it would be awesome if you signed up via this iTalki referral link. Each referral gives me some iTalki points which I can use for lessons. Thank you for your consideration.