About

Most Korean lessons online teach you a sentence you will never say. jigjabi 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’m Paul. Korean is my first language. That’s the easy part. It doesn’t, by itself, make anyone a teacher.

I switched languages as I studied — education in English, bicycle frame building in Japanese, and Korean language education and international trade in Korean. I’ve lived in China for more than ten years, and I teach in Chinese there.

English is the foreign language I’m strongest in. When I teach online, I explain in English and we talk in Korean. I’ve done English interpretation and English teaching as well.

So I know the feeling — a grammar rule explained correctly, and still nothing comes out when you need it. Most of what is on this site exists because I remember that gap.

More about me

This page is about the person behind jigjabi. If you would like to know more about my work, projects and the things I think about beyond Korean teaching, visit my personal site, wensonjabi.com.

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 a levelled learning path, so every lesson has a clear place and a useful next step 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. 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

jigjabi is free to read. If the site is approved for Google AdSense, advertising may help cover part of its running costs. Ads are not endorsements. If a lesson ever links to something I earn from, that lesson will say so.