I’ve updated and fixed a cache of old Korean posts on this site, dating back to 2002-2004, which used to be hosted on their own sub-blog. If that doesn’t interest you, skip this post! 

The peak of my Korean study was when I first arrived, from about 2002-2004. (I never really stopped studying, but until 2009 never did it as seriously as I did in the first few years.) At the time, one of the things I did was run a little miniblog where I posted stuff in Korean. I started it on Blogger.com (where the first three posts still sit with almost-totally broken encoding), but most of it was self-hosted in a Moveable Type blog setup, which was with I started with before I moved to self-hosted WordPress.

This was the header image, at least on the eventual self-hosted version of the site:

(Yes, that’s my handwriting, when I write in Korean. At the time when I scanned and uploaded it, my sister commented that it was nicer than my English handwriting, but I’d say it’s a toss-up which is uglier. And yeah, I used a Korean emoticon. I was still in my twenties, okay?)

Anyway, the blog got a tiny following. Well, I mean, “following” is probably over-generous. It was mostly people I knew offline–a lot of students and Korean friends–but there were also a few other people (such as the blogger at the then-famous Korean blog Gatorlog)I’d never met in real life, who started reading me, commenting occasionally, and so on. It wasn’t a hit or anything, but it got as much traffic as my English blog did, at least at the time.

Then, in 2004, I sort of eased off on the studying, and never seriously got back to it till 2009. Along the way, I changed service providers, the encoding got busted, I took the Korea site down, and imported the broken posts a couple of times before giving up. Finally my little cache of Korean blog posts sat on a CD-Rom drive, waiting to be recovered. File encoding has come a long way since then, and, well… that means recovering the content took some work, but I finally managed it, during a break I took this afternoon. Happily, it seems I managed to salvage everything.

I thought about adding the content as a little sub-blog here on my site, but I doubt I’ll ever start blogging in Korean again, so maybe I’ll just leave this as it is, and when I finally overhaul my site (someday) so that different sections are distinctly styled, I’ll add a style for the Korean blog section.

For now, though, it just looks like everything else here… except it’s (almost) all in Hangeul. If you read Korean, well, you have permission to laugh, but have a little charity in your heart. Foreign languages are hard work, and I was doing my best trying to learn a very foreign language in my late 20s, in part on the principle that it’d help me be a better teacher, in part because I was living in Korea and would be ashamed not to learn some of the language, and in part out of curiosity and necessity. Remember, I was also learning to type in Korean–on a keyboard with no Hangeul on it–so in the the earliest posts, there’s typos mixed in along with the inevitable spelling errors… but I was working full time, and playing in a band (or, sometimes, practically in two bands), and writing a novel. This was a true hobby kind of pursuit. In the interests of honesty, I’ve left everything as it is, warts and all, except for one major typo in the name of the category that collects the posts, an artifact of a frustrating past attempt to import and fix this content.

Anyway, the full archive of posts is available as a category on this blog: 고드의 한국어 블로그. I’ve added it also to the nav menu above, as you can see if you hunt around a bit. As far as I can tell, everything is now in UTF-8 encoding, which means it should be immediately legible to anyone who tries to read it on a modern browser (at least, for a computer with Korean fonts installed?) but if you run across some garbled text in the comments and switching the browser encoding doesn’t help, I’m afraid that is a comment I won’t be able to fix for you! (Let me know if you do, but I did check carefully and I don’t think I missed anything.)

Oh, but that reminds me: there’s probably some other Hangeul elsewhere on the site with broken encoding, I imagine, but I don’t know when I’ll get around to fixing that… the earliest posts on this blog don’t get a lot of traffic, and I’d sooner spend the time getting a few “lost” posts from the first six months of the blog up than trawl slowly around looking from broken Hangeul…

P.S.: One more thing: Back in 2002-2004 (I think actually until 2006) I used the title Eclexys for my blog. It was just a made up word that sounded sort of like “eclectic.” I mention this because I think there are references to the old blog title among these posts, or at least over at my old Blogger page.