Why Key To Korean Hasn’t Received Much Blog Love Recently

This website, Key To Korean, began with THREE primary goals in mind:

1. To provide supplementary materials to my wife’s Korean tutoring classes
2. To motivate me to actively pursue fluency in Korean (and study hard)
3. To push and motivate others around the world to study Korean too

If I were to sum this up in only TWO words, our goals for this site are:

1. RESOURCES
2. MOTIVATION

Therefore, for about two years (from 2012-2014), I was very active with posting on the site almost DAILY. Our site traffic grew immensely (nearly doubling every month for over 12 months) and we now enjoy about 1,000 page views per day.

However, in addition to working hard on Key To Korean (my previous posting schedule was 5am-8am before work), I also have a number of other obligations that take my time and make it difficult to keep up the frenetic pace I once had:

1. Full-time English teacher at Jeonju University (weekly teaching hours = 16 + 1)
2. Part-time computer teacher at GPA High School (weekly teaching hours = 10)
3. English/puzzle/computer elementary camp teacher (weekly teaching hours = 3 on Saturday)
4. Lead graphic designer at church ( + freelancer when local people contact me with projects)
5. With career ambitions to work on WordPress (programming/designing) full-time
6. Husband + father to two beautiful kids (see picture below)
7. My wife is going back to grad school to get a Master’s in Teaching Korean to Foreigners

My daily schedule pretty much looks like this:

• 3:00am wake up? – “Today’s a good day that I can get a lot done!”
• 4:00am wake up? – “Plenty of time for work”
• 5:00am wake up – My regular schedule
• 5:00-7:30am = Personal time (graphic design, blogging, coding, reading)
• 7:30-8:30am = Get ready for work
• 9:00-6:00pm = Full-time job + part-time job
• 6:30-7:30pm = Dinner time
• 7:30-9:30pm = Kids/family time

I don’t really have a lot of margin for myself – and that includes Key To Korean. There are always MANY things I have in my brain that I’d LOVE to have time to do. (Here’s my list for Key To Korean for example):

1. Create a podcast
2. Create some full online Key To Korean grammar courses
3. Self-publish some books with the material I have on this blog
4. Expand the website to include:
   1. Forums (bbPress)
   2. A Social Community (BuddyPress)
   3. A Store (WooCommerce)
   4. Personal Blogs (Multi-site)

But as sole income earner at home, I need to work to provide for my 4-person family and my salary has NOT increased much at university compared with hagwon (though prices have nearly doubled and my family size has increased four-fold in the past 10 years). This website is not (yet) self-sustaining, and though I’d like to be able to use it (and my other online endeavors) to start earning a bit of passive income to help reduce my workload a bit, that isn’t yet happening.

And in 2015, I’m working on building up a few of my other websites in anticipation and preparation for new job applications that I plan to start submitting by this fall. So, at least for a little while, Key To Korean is (unfortunately) relegated to the back burner.

My WordPress teaching blog

My graphic design portfolio

This week and next week are midterm test weeks at my schools, so perhaps I’ll look into preparing a new schedule for the upcoming second half of the semester that can include posting a bit more regularly on Key To Korean (including the second half of the idiom book I’m reading). But, I’ll probably limit my time on this site to 1-3 visits per week until the other sites seem to be performing well on their own and I have more time to get back to my own study of Korean.

So, just note that:

I’m not quitting nor canceling my work on Key To Korean, I’m just pressing PAUSE for the time being.

Thanks for your continued visitation and patronage! This site WILL continue to grow until we have ALL the Korean grammar points covered and I achieve LEVEL 6 on TOPIK – even if it takes another 10 years.

Good luck in your own endeavors!~

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