Japanese and Korean, taught properly

You pick the teacher you would like to meet, and tell us what you are aiming for and roughly where you are now — including "complete beginner, I don't know anything yet", which is a perfectly normal place to start. Your teacher reads that before you meet, and plans around it.

Then it is just the two of you for 35 minutes: a real lesson, not a sales call. You will get a sense of how the teaching feels, and we will get a sense of what you need.

If it turns out we are not the right fit, that is a useful answer too — and it has cost you nothing to find out.

Lessons happen over Zoom. You will get the link with your booking confirmation — no separate app to install, no software to learn, nothing to configure.

Headphones help. A quiet-ish room helps. Beyond that, come as you are. You do not need a textbook before your first lesson, and you do not need to have decided on a study plan — working that out together is part of what the first lesson is for.

Lessons here are taught by people who have spent a career on the language rather than passing through it. Yoshi read psychology at Seoul National University and stayed there for a doctorate: his master's research was on how the mind processes Korean, and his doctorate on how it processes Japanese — the two languages taught here. He wrote that doctorate in Korean, and it won his faculty's prize for the outstanding dissertation of the year.

He is now a senior researcher at the same university, where his work includes language assessment and test design — the same machinery behind the exams many of our students are preparing for. He also teaches for the Japan Foundation, the organisation behind the JLPT, and is a professor in the international faculty at Seoul Digital University. Twenty-five years of teaching sit behind that, including diplomats in Korea's foreign service and executives at major Korean corporations.

He teaches Korean here as well as Japanese, and he is trained to. He was in the first cohort to complete the Korean language teacher training programme at Seoul National University's Language Education Institute, and was recognised as an outstanding graduate of it — the foundation of the career that followed. He lectures in Korean at university level, gives public talks in it, and appears on national television debate programmes.

Korean is not his first language, and that is a reason to consider him for it rather than a caveat. If you are learning Korean, you can choose between a native speaker and a qualified teacher who took the road you are on now — far enough along it to write a doctorate in the language.

There is a reasonable chance you have already heard him. He recorded the audio for many Japanese textbooks published in Korea — including middle-school and university materials — and hosted a Japanese-language programme on Korea's educational radio for six years.

Hyunmee teaches Korean, and in the first half of 2026 she won the Cafetalk Award — the top prize on an international lesson platform, decided by student votes across tutors in 92 countries. She has taught over 7,000 lessons to more than a thousand students there. She is from Seoul, and her speciality is the part of Korean that European learners find hardest: pronunciation. She studied phonetics and language acquisition formally, and she works on the sounds that textbooks describe but rarely fix — the three-way consonant contrast that no European language has, the vowels that sit between the ones you already own, and the way a word changes shape depending on what follows it.

She has also learned a difficult language to a professional standard herself: a degree and then graduate study in Japanese, a year at Hokkaido University, the top-level JLPT certification, and two years living in Japan teaching Korean as a foreign language — teaching it abroad, in her students' language rather than her own. Before that she managed at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Seoul and ran the Japan side of a Korean corporation's business. That range is why her lessons run from TOPIK preparation and business Korean to drama scripts and short stories.

What the numbers say plainly: Yoshi has taught over 3,200 lessons here at elmedian, and Hyunmee more than 7,000 across her teaching career. Those are not headline figures — they are what it looks like when someone has spent years watching where learners get stuck, and knows what usually works next.

The approach is unhurried and grammar-aware: building the foundations properly so that the language holds together later, rather than drilling phrases that fall apart the moment a conversation goes off-script. Beginners through advanced learners are all welcome.

After a lesson, your teacher writes to you — what you worked on, what went well, what to look at before next time. It arrives in a message thread that stays there.

That thread is the part students tell us they did not expect to value so much. Months in, you can scroll back and read what you were struggling with in week two, and see plainly how far that is behind you. You can ask a question between lessons and get a real answer. Nothing you were taught disappears into a call you half-remember.

Languages are not learned in a burst of enthusiasm. They are learned by turning up, week after week, through the stretch in the middle where progress stops feeling obvious. That middle stretch is where most learners quit — and it is exactly where a teacher who knows you makes the difference.

So we plan for months, not weeks. We keep track of where you are. And when a week goes badly, or life gets in the way, that is treated as a normal part of learning a language rather than a failure of commitment.

Plans change, so cancelling is deliberately forgiving: you can cancel a lesson free of charge up to 6 hours before it starts, and your credit goes straight back. Many schools require 24 hours or more.

Every time and date on the site is shown in your own timezone, not ours — booking a lesson with a teacher in Seoul should not require doing arithmetic. Your lesson credits, their expiry dates, your points and your whole booking history are visible on one page, and we warn you before anything is about to expire.

Standard lessons run 50 minutes. You buy credits and spend them when it suits you — there is no subscription running quietly in the background, and no minimum number of lessons per month.