Korean pop culture inspires a Korean-language learning boom at US universities

When first-year student Amaya Maze signed up for a beginning Korean-language course at the University of California, Berkeley, this year, she took her love for South Korean culture to a whole new level. 

As a kid, Maze dreamed of being one of the first Black actors in a Korean drama. 

She even memorized actors’ lines, watched a lot of YouTube videos and read Korean-language textbooks. But most importantly, she said, she watched a lot of Korean soap operas, or K-dramas. 

Today, Maze is among a rising number of students gravitating to Korean-language classes on college campuses across the country. 

In fact, according to the Modern Language Association’s latest survey, Korean has broken into the top-10 list of most-popular second languages at American universities. Schools say the demand is being driven by the rise of Korean pop culture. 

Junghee Park is a senior lecturer in the East Asian Language and Cultures program at UC Berkeley, which was the first university in the United States to offer aKorean-language class in 1942, during the height of World War II. 

Japan had colonized Korea and made Japanese the official language.

UC Berkeley began offering the class as part of an effort to preserve the Korean language. But in recent years, interest has surged with more access to K-drama, K-pop and “a string of highly acclaimed movies made by Korean filmmakers,” Park said.  

More broadly, many students have been swept up in the “Korean wave,” or hallyu, referring to a rise in South Korean pop culture dating to the 1990s and including everything from music to food to film to fashion.  

Park noticed that the all-male supergroup sensation BTS, in particular, has had a huge impact on the popularity of Korean-language studies at the university. After the pandemic, a quarter of the students in her beginning-Korean class were part of the BTS fan club called ARMY.

“As an ARMY member myself, it was one of the best classes,” Park said. 

Park said when she first started teaching at UC Berkeley nearly 20 years ago, most of her students were heritage learners of Korean descent; often, they were learning the language to get closer to their families. 

But now, heritage learners, she said, are in the minority.

Park said she saw the first big uptick in non-Korean students in 2012, when the K-pop song “Gangnam Style” by the singer PSY became a hit. 

“Somehow, it pushed the Korean learning trend here and all over the world,” Park said. 

Diana Carino Lucero, another student at UC Berkeley, can attest to the influence of K-pop on her decision to take the Korean-language class.

“The way I got into K-pop was me and my cousin were planning a quinceañera dance, and we decided to cover a BTS song,” said Lucero, who has been an ARMY member for six years.

Initially, Lucero said, she started learning Korean to understand BTS lyrics. Soon, she got her mom hooked on them, too. They went to a concert together, she said.

Even in her small hometown in Mexico, BTS posters can be found around town, and rest assured, she added, “My family there knows about K-pop.”