A few weeks ago, I reopened my Duolingo account for the first time in two years. I'd previously used it to learn Spanish, a language I acquired with ease, both in school and on my own. But now, I suddenly had a different language in mind: Korean.

See, my dream trip has always been to go to Korea, and no other place has really sparked my interest as much. And fittingly, I was taking interest in something more out of my comfort zone: learning new languages. It had been something I tried doing just for fun, but the fact that there would be no reward in the end besides knowing the language really killed those goals easily.

But now that I had an end goal for learning Korean, there was no stopping me. The only slight problem I had was that I couldn't find the proper resources in front of me. I'd been so used to having everything I needed to learn a language because I was also taking the language in school, but Korean for me was an adventure on its own that I had to learn to navigate by myself.

Thankfully, people around me were willing to help, and a few of my own friends were either already fluent in Korean or even just conversational! Along with that, I was actually given a children's reading book in full Korean to understand by the end of the school year.

A children's book my friend gave me.

So I've made it my mission to be able to read, write and speak Korean up to a first grade level by late May 2018. We'll see how that goes.

The alphabet was the easy part of the language; the vowels have basic patterns to them that are repeated in the consonants, so I found it to be interesting to connect the dots and understand what parts of each consonant I have to look out for to figure out what vowel it was attached to.

Some of the first few words I learned in Korean.

Another thing I noticed is that unlike English and Spanish, Korean separates and combines certain sounds with each other based on syllables. So one syllable in English will be written without any giving away that it stands on its own as one part of the word, but a syllable in Korean is understood by combining different sounds and "stacking them."

Regardless of that, what really wowed me was learning about the different levels of politeness in Korean, thanks to Talk To Me In Korean. I'd originally gone to the site with the simple intent of learning the pronunciation of words that Google Translate couldn't help me with, but there was so much more to the learning experience than this.

Korean is a delightful language that actually takes into account how respectful you should be during conversations, and this actually helped me because I was mainly concerned with how I should avoid sounding disrespectful to strangers.

It was a bit strange for me, as someone who had grown up learning English and Tamil, to see so much of the culture reflected simply within the language, so this blew me away. I found it to be beautiful and telling of the society, but more than anything, I felt like a wall in front of me had been broken down as I was exposed to aspects of the world I'd never seen before.

I was originally so excited to go to Korea just to experience the atmosphere, but now that I'm well on my way to (hopefully) reaching fluency in Korean in the next few years, there's a whole new aspect to the country that I'm looking forward to indulging in.

Communicating with native speakers is obviously going to be a bit of a struggle because I don't know how well I'll do with pronunciation and speaking quickly, but I can guarantee to myself that when the time comes that I finally go to Korea, I'll be making the most out of every opportunity I have to speak.

I'm totally looking forward to embracing what I've learned.

If you're looking to learn Korean on your own and need some assistance, I recommend using Duolingo to learn the alphabet and basic words and Talk To Me In Korean to understand how to speak in conversations and built onto what you've learned!