About Us and Why we’re doing this

The founders of the Adoptee Language Lab are Korean adoptees. We’ve spent years working on our Korean language ability and we’ve noticed that existing Korean language curriculums are not well suited to our needs as Korean adoptee learners.

What do we mean by “our needs?”

Korean adoptees are usually learning Korean with multiple purposes in mind - connecting to culture, living in Korea, communicating with birth family, searching for birth family, uncovering information about personal history, asserting legal and human rights in Korea and exploring identity. There is a personal, emotional and sometimes justice driven element to us learning the language.

Many Korean language materials do not treat the learner as an adult with a personal connection to Korea. They often work with themes that are difficult for some adoptees to explore, like family, country of origin or Korean identity. It’s difficult and inauthentic, for us, because the materials assume a normative version of these concepts that don’t fit us.

The Adoptee Language Lab is developing a curriculum designed with many of our common learning outcomes and motivations in mind. Learning Korean is different for every learner, but we want to provide an alternative that teaches using themes that matter to us in ways that engage with our multi-layered identities.