Why I founded the language learning company and I’m still running it since 2015
During my primary and middle school years, I wondered why people laughed at the color of my skin. As a native Korean, I grew up for many years in a regional city in Korea. The color of my skin wasn’t that white but, back then, people and friends always made fun of me and called me nicknames related to black color like ‘African’ and ‘black coffee’, to name a few. Luckily or unluckily, I was the type of guy who was not afraid to pick a fight with those who insulted me for my skin color and so I got into a lot of physical trouble till I was 15 years old.
I have tried to understand why I was discriminated against. I think it was because in the period 1970 to 1990, Koreans were exposed to military-style drills for political reasons and during this time Koreans had a tendency towards uniformity for the sake of unity or social approval of stereotypes and they developed a dislike towards people who might be unique in some way, including skin color. All this sinks into the unconscious and has an impact on children and their behavior. I was a victim.
The greatest fortune in my life was being able to study in Paris. There, I saw people of many different races and thought that surely nobody cared about my skin color. I was enamored with the joy of diversity. But I faced racism just like every other Asian there. It felt terrible the first time I experienced it but I made up my mind to dig deeper into why this sort of thing happens when I experienced it three or four times.
My conclusion is that if someone has had experience with other cultures, knowing Asian languages and people, for example, they tend not to discriminate against them while those who have not had such experiences have a higher probability of being preoccupied with being racist.
I hypothesize that if everybody knows other cultures pretty well, there will be less discrimination and racism. I couldn’t ignore this hypothesis or my thoughts on racism and its cause. I decided to devote myself to proving my hypothesis. I understood that learning a language is important and key to understanding culture. If people could learn other languages easily, it might be possible for them to understand each other better. That’s a good way to make this a better world, I thought.
I decided that I had to do it and set up my language learning company. This is my story and my language learning company is an engine to keep working on fighting discrimination and racism, no matter how tough the challenges.
Thank you for reading. Please take a look at the apps my team member and I have developed and use them to learn a language.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kr.eggbun.eggconvo&hl=en_US&gl=US
