On September 1, Kim Jong-kook updated his YouTube channel with a new video of him speaking with his fluent English speaker friends.
In this video, Kim Jong-kook revealed how he came to speak English fluently despite the fact that he has never lived abroad.
Kim Jong-kook said, “It’s not too surprising when a person who’s lived in an English-speaking country to speak fluent English, but many have asked me how I speak great English, even though I’ve never live outside Korea.”
He continued, “Well, I enjoy visiting Los Angeles a lot, so I go there frequently. I take my mom with me sometimes, and it felt uncomfortable to have an interpreter with us everywhere we went. We were treated unfairly at times, without the interpreter. That was the reason why I started studying English.”
He resumed, “These days, you can study English by watching educational YouTube videos, and there are various ways to study languages. But there weren’t so many back then. I just bought lots of textbooks, and studied using them. There were plenty of times when I could use the stuff that I learned right away, and I liked that.”
He added, “Until when I was like 28-29, I could only say, ‘Thank you’ in English. Besides ‘Thank you’, I knew a couple of words and phrases for my shopping trips. I’ve never taken private English lessons or anything, but I did annoy my friends who spoke good English. I simply did my best, and put much time and effort into it like how I worked out. Just like working out, it will show good results if you study hard.”
Then, one of his friends commented, “People’s English tend to improve quite a lot when they have a boyfriend/girlfriend from an English-speaking country.”
As Kim Jong-kook heard this, he laughed and said, “Oh, an incredible number of people think that my English is good because I have a daughter and wife in the States, and I’ve studied English to communicate with my daughter. But seriously, that’s not true at all. It’s really not like that.”
He went on, “In the beginning, I tried to speak in English as much as I could. There was a foreign guy at the gym that I went to, so I deliberately went up to him and taught him how to work out. You’ve got to put time and effort into it if you want to be good at it.”
(Credit=”김종국 GYM JONG KOOK” YouTube)
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