thedarren

One of the super frustrating things for me in learning Korean is the speed at which I'm able to read. It's embarrassingly slow, and makes me feel really stupid whenever I have to read something. I can read in my head faster than I can read out loud, but both are well below "useful" speed. Lately I've been able to level up slightly by forcing my brain out of its comfort zone and trying to follow Korean raps. Rapping (which I love) is faster than normal speech, so I figure if I'm able to follow Korean lyrics in a rap as it's going, then eventually I'll be able to actually read. Working well so far, although I can still only get through about half of the subtitles in an average TV newscast. Of course a big part of this is pattern recognition. When first learning Korean, you have to look at each component (jamo) in a character and consciously process how to put them together to sound out the syllable. As you get better, you start to recognize words. And

So, I decided to temporarily put my life as an entrepreneur on hold to become ... well, an entrepreneur =). That is to say, I recently started working with a startup back in San Francisco. I say with  and not at  because geographically I am spending part of my time here in Korea and part of my time back in San Francisco. Sure, there are time-zone issues, but in the grand scheme of things, if it's the right fit, that's a very small detail. What made me go back to being gainfully employed? Well, I found an early-stage company doing very cool stuff, literally in the field that I read textbooks about for fun. I have the chance to work on the kinds of problems I always wanted to work on at Google, but was never quite in the right place. That's not to say that I didn't like the work I used to do - working on a product used by millions of people was actually pretty awesome, and adding features that you could show to family and friends who all use your product was pretty cool