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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

This rings true. I'm a German living in Korea, and there's a fair number of Western foreigners here who eventually grow restless and unhappy, or even embittered. It's usually the people who came for economic reasons, without strong interest in or ties to Korean culture - they have no positives to be able to offset the sometimes very real negatives, and it slowly whittles them away. It's not smart to move somewhere if you don't have a couple of sure-fire things you know you will get joy out of on a consistent basis at the destination.

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I lived nearly 5 years in Korea and it was indeed gradually driving me crazy. I didn't move for economic reasons and I was enjoying enough positives to make the negatives bearable, but in my case the lack of fulfillment at work eventually became too much. That said I have two friends who stayed in Korea but moved to a more reasonable company (Coupang) and they're having a good time.

What did you work as? A lot of Western foreigners in Korea work as English teachers, which indeed rarely offers any sort of long-term promotion path (see my longer comment).

Even outside of that it's very easy to run into a glass ceiling as a foreigner though, yeah. There's relatively few companies where you can work your way up into lead or management positions - though this is often because foreigners simply don't acquire the Korean skills they'd need to manage Koreans. There's some amount of luck and strategizing your career path involved to make it work, and that does leave you with narrow paths to the goal. Engineering and market research/business are probably the easiest fields at least.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not really blaming anyone for failing to make it work and getting out. There's a lot of wishes/desires (in choice of job, in choice of lifestyle, etc.) that are legitimately and totally incompatible with life in Korea as a foreigner, yet have nothing wrong about them.

I was a software engineer at the company that makes exploding smartphones.

I still had plenty of headroom regarding promotions, and I'd argue that Korean skills are a double-edged sword.

In big and rigid corporations, saying that you need luck is an understatement. Short of your VP being fired, it's typically impossible to make significant moves within your company.

Thanks for sharing. Regarding Korean skills being a double-edged sword, yeah, expectations leveled against you rise with your skills, and there's a high bar before those skills really pay off meaningfully (in a job context - in private life they pay off almost immediately), so there's a tough plateau inbetween.

Super interesting that you're in Berlin now - that's where I came from.

3 months at that same company did it to me.

For me it was the work culture at the company. Problem wasn't that they expected me to work late nights, weekends and what not. By the way, they did want me to do all that, of course.

The problem, the real problem, was they just didn't get it why I wouldn't want to spend my evenings and nights, and weekends in the office fixing bugs, writing code etc. They really didn't get it. By "they" I mean my colleagues and managers there.

Language barrier was another problem. Your team might have been a bit different on this but in my team it was difficult to communicate in English. And so was outside.

But whatever the communication I could manage, esp. with people outside work, it was really really awesome. But that was too little, too seldom.

> The problem, the real problem, was they just didn't get it why I wouldn't want to spend my evenings and nights, and weekends in the office fixing bugs, writing code etc. They really didn't get it. By "they" I mean my colleagues and managers there.

Hmm. The Koreans around me do get it. They gripe about it all the time. It's just inertia holding things back. But there are changes; around me I hear more and more of former employees litigating against former employers on contract issues, and succeeding. There's still much left to do in the way of labor law enforcement, though. But it's not "헬조선" for no reason.

> Your team might have been a bit different on this but in my team it was difficult to communicate in English. And so was outside.

Of course, imagine a Korean immigrant in the US writing "it was difficult to communicate in Korean".

> Of course, imagine a Korean immigrant in the US writing "it was difficult to communicate in Korean".

This is a bit unfair when the company we're talking about goes out of its way to recruit and relocate skilled workers from overseas to Korea, knowing than most will never have the time or motivation to learn the language to a professional level.

And yes, I know that shoving English down the throats of 97% of your employees isn't too cool and doesn't make a lot of sense in some teams, but English proficiency is one of the requirements to get a job there. It'd probably be more efficient to have an English only "global division" with mostly (but not only) foreigners, like Rakuten has in Japan. Fun fact: over the period of a short year, one of the two EVPs of my division wasn't a Korean speaker.

> This is a bit unfair when the company we're talking about goes out of its way to recruit and relocate skilled workers from overseas to Korea, knowing than most will never have the time or motivation to learn the language to a professional level.

This is correct, except it's often not the people (generic) you end up having comm difficulities with who made the strategic recruitment decision, which is why things don't work out all the way down. Language barrier and not wanting to put up with it is a legitimate way to want to get out, personally, but I sometimes hear the complaint publically voiced in a way that's at least unempathetic (e.g. toward the amount of stress and embarassment being required to speak English can cause Korean employees). Which then creates follow-on strife like Koreans complaining to me that "Americans are arrogant and only want to speak English wherever they go", and so on, and so forth, which puts me in an awkward spot.

It's best to go in expecting a language barrier, and doing the reversed-roles thought experiment helps.

If you don't know how to speak Korean, go back to your own country.

What brought you to Korea? Did you learn some of the Korean language before moving?

Yep, I went to school in Berlin to study Korean for quite some time before the move, along with self-study before that. Basically, at some point I turned my hobbies into my career, so I needed new hobbies/outlets and ended up picking "learn Korean" for a bunch of reasons (I had done some light work on a CJK input stack and feel in love with Hangeul in a geeky sort of way, a layman's interest in linguistics, some Korean colleagues/acquaintances and a strong interest in the pop culture and history - music, movies, contrasting Korea's 20th century with Germany's, etc.).

Over time this and spending some time in the country changed the make-up of my social circle a lot (more and more people also learning Korean, or being involved with Korea somehow, e.g. ... being Korean :). Eventually I moved over and basically already had a support network of local friends and activities (people to hang out with, a weekly engineer meet-up, etc.) so it went pretty smoothly.

I've been here long enough now that the honeymoon period is definitely over and I've seen a fair amount of the pressures/stresses of life in Korea either up-close or as people close to me went through them. Yet I enjoy so much of what's going in and what's available, and the people close to me, so it's a good life.

Many Western foreigners in Korea are in a very different place. There's a large swath that came over in 2007-2011 as English teachers after the US recession, because $13.5/hour for English teaching in Seoul beat $7.50/hour at Starbucks in Des Moines, and that's all they could do with a sub-optimal undergrad degree. Yet that job offers a promotion path to almost none (along with many English schools in Korea being more or less scam businesses, not-so-wholesome) and they often don't acquire any marketable skills good for anything else while doing it, and the money made as an English teacher isn't good enough to support anything but a bachelor lifestyle in Seoul. And they often don't speak Korean and don't feel any strong ties to Korean culture. That can get pretty stressful and frustrating.

That's really interesting because it is very similar to my reasons for going to Japan. I made a semi-random choice to learn Japanese. Because I was busy with work, I couldn't really afford the time to study properly and I made the fateful decision to move to Japan so that learning Japanese would be one of my job requirements ;-)

I really think that language is a gateway to the culture. It hacks with your mind so that things you wouldn't accept without the language, seem completely reasonable with it. In Japan (and I suspect it might be similar in Korea) language is often the only real barrier for being accepted by other people in the culture. You go from being some scary foreigner, to being a semi-celebrity that everyone wants to talk to (hmmm... it probably helps that I live in the countryside ;-) ).

I'm really interested learning mandarin some day day. Can you describe how you managed to get started with Japanese? I have a 1 year old so all free time currently goes to her and the Mrs. I think I also don't work very efficiently .. so need to fix that too.

Ha ha! I really need to write this down in a central location (again... because I slowly refine my opinion). As briefly as I can put it:

Strap on the seat belt because you will be working on the language for a long time if your goal is adult level proficiency and fluency. 5 year olds have about a 5000 word vocabulary and add about 1000 words every year until they reach about 18-20 (depending on if they go to university). There are about 1500 grammar structures to learn in an average language (this last stat is pulled out of my ass, but I think it's about right).

There is no course, nor video, nor software that will get you anywhere beyond absolute beginner level. You will be lucky if you manage to talk like a 5 year old.

Very long story short (and slightly controversial): You will acquire language by comprehending input that is repeated enough times to remember it. I personally believe that you need to also have a way to test your assumptions (but my opinion is not echoed in the scientific literature -- just my opinion).

Way to success: Learn to read. It is your secret weapon. Pinyin is fine for helping you learn the readings for hanzi, but do not get into the habit of reading pinyin. There are about 3600 (IIRC) Chinese characters that you need to know to be functionally literate (there are others in use, but you will be able to devine there meanings through context). The Chinese characters are made up of building blocks and are not especially difficult to learn. They also provide a very powerful mnemonic for vocabulary. Remember that if your goal is adult level proficiency, you will need 15K+ words. The 3K characters will dramatically increase the speed at which you can learn the vocabulary because the system is very logical.

My biggest suggestion is to read. Whatever you like. However, since there is a strong tradition of manwa (comic books) in Chinese, which handily use conversational language, this would be my way to go.

Learn grammar through example. Some people like to learn grammar. You can, but you don't have to. It's a double edged sword. It helps you figure out the meaning of sentences. However, it also makes you believe that you can construct sentences using these rules and have it make sense. This is incorrect. This is why non-native speakers have all these bizarre grammar ticks when they speak.

Use spaced repetition software to help you (I recommend Anki). There should be a vocabulary list of the basic words somewhere. The first 2-3000 of these are probably worth memorising. After that you should switch your focus to learning vocabulary through context (because the meanings will be subtly different than their English counterparts). Read, read, read.

Last piece of advice is the most important and feel free to ignore everything else I've said. If you do not do this, I think it is impossible to succeed: Study every day. Better to study twice a day. Better to study three times a day. 5 minutes 3 times a day is better than 30 minutes once a day. 30 minutes once a day is better than 7 hours once a week. (And in fact, anything less than 4 times a week will have you reaching a ceiling pretty quickly and staying there forever).

Also: Never give up. Good luck!

谢谢!

What truly impresses me is how people can find a purpose big enough to continue studying for years and, more importantly, with the right attitude.

Without a purpose it is hard to retain vocabulary for good. In fact, I had forgotten the Chinese character for "Thank you" even though I studied the most basic characters daily for about 6 months some years ago.

Learning English, otoh, has been rather easy as my interest in things such as programming pretty much require it. But then again there is French. Even though I wanted to be able to use it outside school I was never able to have a real conversation in this language. There just wasn't anything French I really connected with. Even their TV program is boring ;)

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