Zean Yoon

After sticking with Zeanie for 3 years, I can absolutely say that she is one of the best teachers I've ever studied under. I started out with very low confidence and was honestly scared to even speak (this is even after 2 years of taking Korean in college on my own). However, she saw that I had a high willingness to learn and was encouraged by it, personalizing each lesson for me. She mixed a variety of lesson plans hand-picked from different sources, which I totally entrusted in her hands - no questions asked. She would find simple expressions that I could use that I could re-use over and over and still sound natural. She is also super considerate/understanding of conflicts that may come up and was always willing to reschedule or refund in case of any emergencies. She didn't ask me to write this, but this is my thanks to her for all she's done. If anything, the more you put in, the more she gives back. If she sees that you're invested, she'll invest back. You just gotta stick to it.

I've now had 10 lessons with Ms. Yoon, and after each lesson I am excited about what's next. She knows how to customize a lesson plan so that it's difficult enough to challenge me but not so difficult that I despair of improving. I had been stuck at a high novice level because Koreans understood me well enough and didn't feel the need to correct my grammar, but Ms. Yoon has been incredibly patient in correcting my frequent mistakes and in encouraging me to develop my reasoning skills in Korean. I've had several Korean teachers over the years, but Ms. Yoon is by far the best one I've had.

I'm so happy to have found 윤 선생님. I found myself having trouble with vocabulary from a group class I was doing and asked her if we could incorporate it into our lessons sometime in the future. To my surprise, only an hour later, she had already altered our study plan so that we could go ahead and focus on that topic. Besides that, I feel that I'm truly "learning" Korean instead of simply memorizing it for tests. Due to her consistent repetition of grammar, I'm actually remembering what we studied previously and can incorporate it into my speaking and writing.

I've been studying with Professor Yoon for about two months now and I am amazed by my progress...starting from complete scratch to actually understanding and being able to say quite a lot. It already has made a huge difference in my comfort level being in Korea. My colleagues and friends keep asking me how I am learning so fast! I highly recommend Professor Yoon (and I love her sense of humor, too!).

We've made a lot of progress in both grammar and vocabulary- I've been able to recognize it in reading and listening, and I'm slowly becoming slow to integrate it into my own speaking and writing.

Thanks to 윤선생님's repetition of core concepts, I've noticed that I'm able to apply certain aspects of Korean much more easily than before. In the group classes that I attend, there are several non-native students that still use 반말 or other forms of impolite speech when speaking to the teacher, causing the atmosphere to become uncomfortable. 윤선생님 addresses the most crucial building blocks of Korean when teaching and builds from there. While some textbooks seem to jump from topic to topic, she's able to understand how to build my knowledge to the point where I can find connections between the different grammatical structures.