About jabi.

Most Korean lessons online teach you a sentence you will never say. jabi. starts from the other end — a line in a drama, a particle that will not stop confusing you, the sentence you needed at a counter in Seoul and did not have.

Who writes this

I am Paul Bhang (방상훈). I have taught Korean full-time as a lecturer at Hangzhou Normal University since 2021, and hold an M.A. in Education. Before that I spent six years working as a Korean–English translator and subtitler.

I am a native Korean speaker. That is the easy part, and on its own it would not qualify anyone to teach. The part that matters more is that I have learned two other languages as an adult, from zero, while living in the countries that speak them — Japanese to JLPT N2 in Tokyo and Chinese to HSK 4 in Hangzhou, where I still live.

So I know exactly what it feels like to have a grammar rule explained correctly and still not be able to use it. Most of what is on this site exists because I remember that gap.

Why the explanations look like this

Fifteen years before teaching, I worked across five continents — logistics in Seoul and Vienna, my own import business, a sawmill in Papua New Guinea, automotive programme management in Shanghai, bicycle mechanics in Tokyo, a guest house in Hangzhou. Four languages came out of that, along with a lot of conversations I got wrong in public.

That is why the lessons here spend so much time on things textbooks skip: why 못 가요 is the kinder refusal even when the real reason is that you do not want to go, why Koreans say 우리 엄마 and not 제 엄마, what 오빠 signals that nobody told you it signals. Those are the things that actually decide whether a conversation goes well.

How the lessons are built

• One idea per lesson. If it needs two, it becomes two lessons.
• Real sentences. Examples come from how people speak, not from textbooks.
• Wired to a curriculum. The grammar reference follows the King Sejong Institute course, so every lesson has a place in a real syllabus rather than floating alone.
• A quiz at the bottom. Reading is not learning until you have tried to recall it.
• Corrections welcome. If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it and say so.

About the AI, plainly

Drafts on this site are written with AI assistance, and then reviewed, corrected and signed off by me before anything is published. Nothing goes live that I have not read as a native speaker and as the person who teaches this for a living. Where native speakers genuinely disagree about a nuance, the lesson says so rather than flattening it into a rule.

I mention this because you deserve to know, and because the review is the part that takes the time.

Lessons

I teach a small number of learners privately online, alongside the university work. There is no booking system and nothing to buy on this site — if you are interested, email me and we will talk about whether it is a fit before anything else happens.

How this site pays for itself

jabi. is free to read and shows advertising. Ads are served by Google and are not endorsements. If a lesson ever links to something I earn from, that lesson will say so.

Elsewhere: wensonjabi.com — my personal site, which is about thinking rather than Korean.