brandon

I am the founder and developer of Natively. I originally studied Japanese for about two years, but starting in 2022, I switched to focusing on Korean.

My language learning adventure began when I started preparing for a vacation to Japan in 2019. After a few weeks of study, I was hooked. All of sudden, my new dream was to move abroad. Initially, I planned to move to Japan, but due to the pandemic that proved to be impossible - I ended up moving to Korea, which I also love! :)

Learning Japanese and subsequently Korean has been a struggle, especially my first small steps into native content. As you might read in my よつばと！ review, I was very disheartened by the first few books I tried reading. But I kept buying more books... and eventually I found some I could make my way through (Magic Treehouse thank you!). It still is tough work, but I finally find myself making progress, which is incredibly rewarding.

One of the biggest turning points for my Japanese journey was finding the WaniKani book clubs. They're fantastic - and they really show how much easier it is to tackle native content together.

Korean, unfortunately, suffers from a different challenge. In my experience, the online community is much smaller than the Japanese ones and it's hard to find recommendations on where to begin when you start reading & watching. I've also focused much more on speaking as I live here now.

I'm hopeful that this site becomes a place where we can all share our experiences and recommendations with native content and that we can help each other out.

If you have any feedback, do not hesitate to contact me, either on Natively, or via the product updates forum thread.