By Pankaj Agrawal

When Samsung hired me in 2004 from IIT Kanpur, India for the GSP-SNU program, I did NOT even know how to say "Hi" in Korean. Today, I am very comfortable with the Korean language. I thought of sharing my point of view on learning Korean (or any foreign language for that matter).

Before knowing the “How” of learning a new language, it’s important to know the “Why?” (reason, motivation) of it. I was lucky to have identified many “Whys” very early on. The Big 3 motivations for me to learn Korean were/are as follows.

1. To be able to explain to Koreans that I am a vegetarian and that I don’t eat chicken, fish, seafood, ham, etc. and request them to prepare for me something that I could relish.
2. To be able to navigate through Korea on my own– I have been to almost every corner of Korea several times.
3. To differentiate myself (add foreign language skill as an asset to my professional portfolio) and to be able to do a good job in Samsung. Proficiency in Korean really expands your professional bandwidth and is certainly one of the many key enablers for success in Samsung. Overtime, I realized that if you speak Korean in Samsung, you can do wonders; and if you don’t speak Korean, “wonders” may happen to you.

By Subhojit Chakladar

It has been more than a year and a half since I set foot in Korea and yet it seems as if it was only last week that bid 'another farewell' to my family and boarded the flight for Incheon. Two years ago, the only things I knew about Korea could be summarized in just 4 words - Seoul, Pusan, Samsung and LG! The program coordinator had sent a Korean language studies book to my home before I came to Seoul but I was thousands of miles away in Germany, sipping beer and playing with the human auditory perception! In fact, when I landed in Incheon, it'd be fair to say that I knew nothing about Korea. A year and seven months has passed since then and I'm amazed to think of the amount of things that I've learnt about this place and the range of experiences that I've had. Many of these experiences have turned into posts on this blog. This particular post is a photo-essay of the journey so far. Here it goes: