When Young-mee Yu Cho, the first professor of Korean Language and Culture at Rutgers University, began teaching in 1996, her entire class was made up of heritage speakers— Korean Americans who were exposed to the language at home and sought to improve their fluency. “The first 10-15 years were majority Korean-American students, but now at Rutgers, we have about 20% heritage students and 80% non-heritage,” Cho said.
This trend is not limited to Rutgers University but is seen in various other universities. According to The Modern Language Association, between 1998 and 2016, fall enrollments in the Korean language increased from 4,479 to 13,936, an increase of over three times. Moreover, the latest estimate shows a 31% increase between 2016 and 2021. Though the raw numbers are still quite small, looking at why any jump might happen is interesting.
Hee Chung Chun, an Assistant Teaching Professor of Korean Language and Culture and Korean Language Placement Advisor at Rutgers, believes Korean pop culture has played a role in the increased enrollment rates of non-heritage students. “The first year I was here, Gangnam Style became a hit,” Chun said. “Gangnam Style” is a song by South Korean musician Psy that was released in July 2012. The song became a massive hit around the world, and its accompanying music video became the first video on YouTube to reach one billion views.
In recent years, the unwavering success of Korean entertainment, including K-pop group BTS, the Oscar-winning film “Parasite,” and the Netflix show “Squid Game,” has captivated audiences and sparked a growing interest in Korean culture and language. As more people worldwide become exposed to Korean entertainment, they discover the richness and diversity of Korean culture, leading to a surge in demand for Korean language classes and cultural education.
“As the placement advisor, I’ve seen non-heritage students come in with some knowledge of Korean. More and more, especially over the last two to three years there have been non-heritage students that start from fourth-year level Korean,” Chun said. “When I ask these specific students why and where they learned Korean, they’ll list their favorite K-drama. Based on what I hear from the students, it really had an impact on why they began to study the Korean language,” she adds.
As Korean culture continues to gain popularity worldwide, more and more students are enrolling in Korean language programs at universities. However, over the last decade, there has been a complete transformation in the student body demographics, with a super-diverse group of students now embodying the Korean Foreign Language (KFL) programs across the states.
The KFL program at Rutgers University has expanded to include three tenure-track positions in Korean Studies, two non-tenure-track teaching professors, and up to nine part-time lecturers. The program’s growth has been fueled by the university’s enthusiasm and support and the student population’s growing interest.
“When the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures allocated resources to the Korean program, enrollment doubled, and Korean language students outnumbered those studying Chinese in 2018 and Japanese in 2022,” Cho said. The program also offers courses on Korean culture, literature, cinema, history, and linguistics taught in English. While these courses comprise a relatively small portion of the entire program’s enrollment, they have also seen a significant increase in enrollment over the past eight years, doubling from 121 to 242 students.
It’s important to note that many of these non-heritage students are dropping out of these courses due to the difficulty of learning the language. “Non-heritage students often underestimate the level of difficulty in learning Korean, particularly in mastering the Korean writing system and grammar rules,” Cho said. “Many students struggle to keep up with the rigorous pace of the courses and become discouraged when they cannot achieve fluency as quickly as they had hoped.”
This trend is particularly worrisome as many students who drop out of Korean language courses may miss out on opportunities to fully appreciate and understand Korean culture and its unique nuances. “The Korean language I would describe as very difficult. It’s a very different structure from English,” said Kaitlyn Russo, who is a non-heritage student majoring in Korean. “We learn topics that are more geared towards politics and history rather than present pop culture, making it extremely difficult for beginners to comprehend if they were to continue taking Korean classes.”
Korean is widely regarded as one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn, mainly because it has a complex grammar system, distinct sentence structures, and a large number of honorifics, which can be difficult to master. “Learning the language has much more to do with how much vocabulary you know for you to understand the grammar,” Rachel Cho said a Korean-American student at Rutgers.
According to the Foreign Service Institute, an agency that trains U.S. diplomats in foreign languages, Korean is categorized as a Category IV language, which means it requires around 2,200 hours of study for a native English speaker to achieve professional proficiency. This is significantly more than Category I languages, such as Spanish and French, which take around 600-750 hours of study.
“There needs to be more correlation between the course content. Elementary 101 and 102 are relatively easy compared to everything else and immediately the classes jump to Intermediate where it’s expected to speak fluent Korean,” Russo adds. This could have negative implications for Korean language programs in universities and their future funding and viability.
“We are making it fun but also very rigorous,” Cho said. She highlights the importance of adapting to changing student demographics and adopting innovative approaches to language education. Cho believes that the transformation of KFL education in the U.S. serves as a model for other language programs seeking to adapt to changing demographics and provide high-quality language education to a diverse student population.
