Why we chose the phone

Pick Up Korean is a phone call. On the days and at the time you choose, your phone rings and a Korean partner talks with you for up to 30 minutes, and on any other day you can call the number yourself. We are a team in Korea, and before Pick Up Korean we built the same calls for Koreans learning English.

A call comes to you

Most ways of learning start only when you start them. A textbook stays on the shelf until you take it down, an app stays on your home screen until you open it, and each time you have to decide to begin. A scheduled call asks for one small decision, which is to answer. You made the bigger decision once, when you picked the days and the time.

A call also comes without subtitles. You hear only a voice, the way you would hear a Korean friend calling you or a shop in Seoul answering the phone. We think that if you can keep up 20 minutes of Korean on the phone, a coffee with a Korean friend gets a lot easier.

There is nothing to install. Any phone works, and on a computer you can call from the browser. Between calls you can text the same number, and your partner texts back with your last conversation still in mind.

The name

The name comes from the phone: it rings, and you pick up. In English, picking up a language also means learning it by using it, and using Korean is what the calls are for.

Your partner is an AI, and says so

Your partner is an AI, and if you ask, your partner tells you so. We made the partner an AI for practical reasons. An AI can pick up at six in the morning or at midnight. An AI does not get tired of the same question, and it remembers what you talked about, so the next call can start where the last one stopped.

Each partner has a name and a personality that we wrote: a Korean in their twenties with tastes of their own. None of the partners is a real person, and none is modeled on a singer, an actor or anyone else who exists.

That line matters to us. Fans care about the people they follow, and we will not put a real person’s name, face or voice on a product without that person. The people drawn on this blog’s covers are made up too.

What happens to your calls

Each call is kept as text and as a recording, and only you can see them on the website. Transcripts and recordings are deleted within 30 days of the call. What you learned, the summaries and the reports stay. We don’t use your transcripts to train AI, and we don’t sell them.

After a call, the website shows the whole conversation as text. Phrases that came out awkwardly come back corrected, with the reason. New words are listed with their meaning and an example, next to the phrases to try on the next call.

What we don’t know yet

Pick Up Korean runs on the same calls as our service for Koreans learning English, down to the notes you get after each call. What we don’t know yet is how learners of Korean will use the calls. We don’t know which hours you will call, how long a beginner wants to talk, or whether fans want to talk about their favorite group or would rather talk about anything else for twenty minutes.

We will learn those things from the first calls, and we will write about what we find on this blog. If you would like to hear a call before deciding anything, the trial call is ten minutes long and needs no account and no card.