"Dreaming of spreading Hangul across Europe" Lee Jang-seok, President of the European Korean School Council

[Anchor]
With the spread of the Korean Wave, the number of people trying to learn Korean from all over the world is increasing significantly.

I have a compatriot who is making hidden efforts to promote our language in unfamiliar lands.

Let's meet Lee Jang-seok, president of the European Korean School Council, who became a Korean evangelist after leaving France to study genetics.


[Lim Sa-rang/European Korean School Youth Camp Participant]
It's my first time here and it's really fun. I met a lot of people, so it was really fun. I think it would be nice to come again if we have another chance like this.


[Lee Jang-seok/President of the European Council of Korean Schools]
It's a Korean-speaking camp, but there are many cases where we use local languages that we can't control, and if we put Europe together, there are several countries in the same group.

Then suddenly, if you speak French or German, no one else can understand you.

So you avoid it yourself.

'Oh, if I speak German, I can't communicate with other friends.'

There is a way that I try to communicate in Korean and focus more on Korean, so European camps mean a lot more than national camps....

I came to study (30 years ago) and my oldest child was less than a year old at the time.

As my child grows older, it didn't seem that easy to communicate in Korean with his children and parents when he met Korean families who had settled in the area for a long time.

After meeting such a home for a few families, I made the pledge, 'Oh, we must keep Korean.'.

(a daily workbook) collected for a month and sent it (to another family), and now we're going to (study) it a month later. I started with six students

(early in Korean language school), and because I couldn't find a classroom, I found a house with a rather spacious living room in the city, and we gathered there over the weekend and started studying Korean.

Now that there are about 230 students, I think we have made remarkable progress in more than 20 years.

It's been more than 20 years since I joined Hangul School, and the world has changed and we are changing.

The number of locals who want to learn Korean has increased a lot, and Korea's status has risen a lot due to the Korean Wave fever throughout Europe.

If there is a team prepared at this time, I think it will be an opportunity to promote Korea more.. Because the first generation of

(Korean) does not increase, the number of Korean language school students does not increase.

If so, I think the way to endure even such a small scale is to connect with the local area and localize it a lot so that the school will continue to operate smoothly in the future.

These days, artificial intelligence and advanced new technologies are coming out, so we hope that the work we have been doing (Korean education) can be integrated into the new technology and fixed.

Since many Korean language school classes have come to a stage where they can be done non-face-to-face through the Internet, and there are ways to use artificial intelligence in the future, we continue to find ways to introduce new technologies to what we have been doing.


[Jeong Kyung-sun/Principal of Reading Hangeul School in England]
(Chairman Lee Jang-seok) thinks it is necessary to break the fixed framework of Hangul School above all else, and I am very supportive of the council project in that direction.


[Lee Jang-seok/President of the European Council of Korean Schools]
Even if you keep doing it, there are many more things you want to do.

(the globalization of Korean and Korean culture) has come so far that it feels a different world.

So I'm thinking about continuing to spread Korean culture throughout the Mediterranean, southern France, and Europe.

I hope you understand that people in Korea are also working hard in foreign countries like this, and I hope you can help me further so that that part can be connected well.