my story.

Eighth grade. I was scrolling YouTube when the algorithm served me a video promising I could learn to read Korean in five minutes. Seriously. It was impossible not to click. Forty minutes later, I could read.

I read Korean Wikipedia out loud to anyone who'd listen. I'd show my friends 바나나 and watch their faces. "It's banana." I was the guy who could read Korean.

Then someone asked: do you understand what you're reading? I didn't. Not a word, apart from the English ones. Two weeks later I quit. Learning a language felt way too overwhelming.

I'd never taken a language class in my life. No Spanish, no French. Language classes seemed to get people worse GPAs and not much else, and my GPA mattered to me. Speaking a language is only cool if you speak it well, and everyone who learned one in school said they sucked. I wasn't trying to suck. So in high school I took Latin. A language you never have to speak.

There was no Day 1 without these people. I hadn't even considered learning a language until I watched real people on YouTube do it. Plenty of language YouTubers were sus. A few weren't: they'd tell you when someone's method was insane, or just wrong.

Slowly, I learned how to learn. You don't need to live abroad. There are free resources. People do this without classes. Maybe six months isn't insane.

Then Xiaomanyc posted "I Learned Korean in 24 Hours". It didn't inspire me. It made me feel horrible. Korean felt like my language, Mrs. Jeon's language, and I'd been too scared to even try. If he could do that in 24 hours, what was my excuse?

There was something else, too. My parents are from Nigeria, and my brothers and I never learned Yoruba. I remember the judgment people put on my parents for that. Then I felt it myself.

Senior year, I looked at my Steam library: 10,000 hours. Ten thousand hours of one thing, and not much to show for it. Games gave me something cool. But I wanted to become a competent adult and do things with my life.

My favourite thing about transitions, middle school to high school, high school to college, is that you get to become a new person and leave behind the version of yourself you don't like. If I was starting over, I wanted it to mean change. Challenge. Something new. And a language was already right there.

I'd been into K-pop for a while, but liking the culture and learning the language are two different things. The first thing I did was get Pimsleur on Audible, because Ikenna used it. Then tutors, language exchanges, strangers in apps. The goal was the one on every thumbnail: fluent in three months.

I was a month into Korean when Bong Joon-ho won Best Picture. It felt like serendipity. Like the world was calling my name and pointing me down this path.

Parasite got me into Korean movies. Then I heard people watch K-dramas. Honestly? Not for me. Why would I watch TV when I could be studying?

COVID moved everything online and the exchanges dried up. Apps, more apps, a couple of grammar books.

In a weird way, it was the perfect chance to become someone new. I learned to skateboard, and it became close to a daily ritual. I learned K-pop choreography in my room: NCT 127, BTS.

I nearly quit Korean before I'd even started university.

The week I turned 18, I wrote my whole day on an index card. 5 AM, wake up, Korean podcast immediately. Anki. A Pimsleur lesson on a jog.

I had the plan and I had the effort. I had no way of knowing if any of it was working.

I took Talk To Me In Korean's level test. It put me in level 7.

I found Matt vs Japan, and a video called "Why you still can't understand your target language." Clarity.

Three days later I made a Korean YouTube account, because he said you need your own language environment. I spent the rest of that month starting and stopping. I restarted a premade Korean grammar deck, twenty to seventy-five new cards a day, and wrote my day out again, in Korean this time.

The graduation I'd been dreaming about never happened. COVID cancelled the ceremony, and a sign on the lawn at Tuscarora was the closest I got.

Half of me was relieved. I didn't feel ready to speak Korean to anyone yet. It gave me an out.

There were no Korean subtitles, so it was English subtitles or none. I chose none. Sixteen episodes, one or two a day, sitting in my living room.

That's when I first felt my brain change. I told myself: I'm a Korean viewer. I don't need every word. I can follow the scenes, the faces, who's the good guy and who's the villain. I started hearing the spaces between words.

I'd run into my brothers' room and tell them everything. It was COVID, we were all home. They thought I'd lost it.

I wrote a plan for YouTube, in Korean. A folder called 이미 봤다, "already watched", so I could keep listening all day. And my favourite channels: 잠뜰 TV, 총몇명, 콕 TV, 댓글툰, and 대륙남 TV.

대륙남 was the one I watched more than anyone. Every bookmark in my browser was Korean by then: two dictionaries, Papago, a typing game, Netflix, Hulu, Viki. Matt vs Japan said you get comfortable with a language by touching it all day, not by avoiding it.

No more English. I mined my first sentence card that day, and the next day I added a premade vocab deck with every English translation stripped off.

I tried Crash Landing on You. Couldn't. Tried Hospital Playlist with Korean subtitles. Too far above me. Honestly, I sucked at everything for a month. I did it anyway, because I wanted to be the person who didn't suck.

Up at 6 AM. Matt vs Japan's interviews in my ears every day. Everything in English went to 2x speed. Only Korean got 1x. Even my games went Korean.

Short, cheesy, and full of students talking like students, people who sounded like me. I made two playlists that day: web dramas, and web dramas to watch again. They played on repeat while I fell asleep and woke up.

My YouTube channel is gone now. Both playlists survived, and they still say my name.

I bought metal chopsticks and learned to eat with them, because that's what they use in Korea.

I didn't stop playing games. I stopped playing them in English. I found a Stranger Things game in Korean and got to play as my boy Lucas. Then a Slam Dunk game, and an RPG whose name I never learned.

If it was in Korean, it was good enough for me to experience it. If it wasn't, I mostly skipped it.

I got my younger brother into immersion. He picked French. I set him up with the cards, the tools and the principles, and he took off faster than I'd imagined.

That's when immersion got really fun: I wasn't doing it alone. There was a whole Discord of learners grinding together, and tools from Migaku that made sentence cards fast.

I started university at Howard, studying political science and psychology. All online, because of COVID. Two years to the day before I'd land in Korea.

Somewhere in August I fell off making cards. Some days forty, some days zero. The ones I did make, I often mined by photographing the subtitles at the bottom of my screen, plenty of them from 대륙남. And I never stopped reviewing.

Matt vs Japan talks about committing to one domain once your base is solid. People who spread themselves across a million things get lost.

Mine was web dramas. The cheesy, cringy romance stuff, from October to February. Comedy and streams when I was tired. Your interests pull one way and the best thing to do pulls the other. That's the tug of war, and it's a lifelong one.

I started my monolingual transition with the Korean Learners' Dictionary, set to Korean only, rewriting the backs of my cards one by one.

By the new year, every card was Korean. Zero English. Some had become 20-second clips of scenes I loved. Less flashcards, more immersion memories.

Skateboarding had become part of my day during COVID. Then I fell and shattered my clavicle.

No more exercise for a while. Which meant more immersion.

The Refold Korean Discord began. People all over the world doing exactly what I was doing, sharing what they found, sitting in group sessions just to do their cards together.

Matt vs Japan was the voice. Refold was the community. For a while I led its web drama club: I'd stream the shows and hand out the vocab.

I took the King Sejong Institute's online level test. First attempt: 2B. Listening 60, reading 68, grammar 57%.

I thought I was better than that. Well, we still suck. What are we going to do? I took it again the same day and got a 3A.

I fell in love with High Kick and watched it with my parents. It felt like the Disney Channel shows I grew up on, just in another language. That made it easy to watch, and weirdly freeing. My feed filled up with Korean memes, too.

For the new year I left 대륙남 a comment, in Korean: 항상 잘 보고 있습니다. I'm always watching. I was using Korean, guys.

Before the interview, I'd watched and listened to every video Jongin from This Is Big Data had made. He talked about immersion, in Korean. He was the first voice that replaced my need for Matt vs Japan.

Then he interviewed me. I understood every word, and even gave him a Korean word he'd forgotten. When he asked how many hours I'd done, I had to rebuild my days out loud and guess. Around 3,000. The video came out on February 26. It's private now.

Right after that interview, I started tracking every single hour in Toggl. The first categories were rough: passive listening, sleep listening, active streaming. They became nine activities, and every entry got the exact show or channel.

From mid-February I was back to adding ten or more sentence cards every day, some days 150. I tracked for eighteen months. Every hour is still there.

I started a reading series written for learners, 외국인을 위한 한국어 읽기. One a day. By April 2 I'd read 35 of the 74.

A week earlier I'd saved a tweet that said it better than I could: quantity of contact gets you results, not beating your head against a wall.

On April 12 I posted my first win in the Refold Discord: my best reading day ever. Six hours of reading in one day.

Level test again: 3A, with a perfect vocabulary score.

Doing well on a test doesn't require you to be good at the language. It just so happens that if you're good at the language, you'll do well on the test anyway.

One year in, 4,000 sentence cards. If the goal was eighteen months, output had to come to the front. No more running away from language exchanges. I started shadowing.

Two weeks later I got a perfect score on the beginner test. Of course I did. I'd taken it three times.

I was testing Migaku's alpha. Every day something broke, I took a screenshot, and I sent it to Lucas and the team. Half a word highlighted. A word chopped into pieces. Those screenshots still have their dates on them.

Later I worked with them on the Korean materials. Long nights. A teammate there gave me my Korean name, 혁수. I picked the last name, 오, for my middle name. And because it sounds cool.

One more try at the higher test: 100 on listening, 96 on reading. When I saw that perfect listening score, I was done with tests. Yeah. We're good.

That fall I got a fellowship at my university for international relations, and I spent it working with Migaku.

I watched Squid Game in Korean long before it blew up. Then the whole world was watching it, and Korea was on top. I was just experiencing it the way it was made.

For my sophomore writing class at Howard I wrote a review of it, with a bit of Korean in it, translated. 전 엄청 재미있게 봤었죠. I really enjoyed it. I mined cards from it, too.

November 2021 was the most immersion I'd ever recorded in one month: 407 hours. Of course I posted it.

Someone asked if that meant thirteen and a half hours a day. Approximately. Some days less, some days more. Then the jokes: if the U.S. Army says Korean takes 2,500 hours, I could be fluent in 185 days. Sounds like I'm army fluent.

I met George through that interview with Jongin. Two university students, one in the UK and one in the US, whose friendship was founded on the same language learning principles. So we started a podcast.

Remember when I said I was done with tests? Yeah, I lied. I couldn't help myself. On Christmas Eve I took the intermediate test: 85 on listening, 92 on reading. Level 4A.

Eighteen months of Korean immersion, every single day since July 1, 2020. I posted my stats in the Refold Discord: 3,790 hours in 2021 alone. Then I moved on to stage 3.

Someone in the Korean Refold server asked how to set Toggl up the way I did. At 2 AM I wrote the whole thing out: install it everywhere, one project per activity, the show or channel as the description, 기타 when you forgot what you watched.

A few days later someone else jumped in just to say thank you. They'd been tracking everything under one project and adding it up by hand.

That's the thing about me doing a lot. I always wanted to do it with other people. If me being there meant someone else would stay, I'd stay.

I submitted my application to study abroad in Seoul for fall 2022. I'd built a year of comfort, and I needed something to force me out of it.

Right after I applied, I finally tried to reach Mrs. Jeon. Her school email didn't answer. Over lunch, an old teacher of mine told me she had passed away. In the spring of 2020, the same spring I was picturing that graduation moment.

She never knew I learned her language, or that it was because of her. Yonsei, Korea, her culture, her people: all of it connects back to her.

Her name and her story will live on as long as I live, and as long as I speak Korean.

Four years later, I put the words I never got to say to her in the front of my first book: 감사합니다, 전 선생님. 선생님 덕분에 이 길을 찾았어요. 하고 싶었던 말을 이제야 합니다. Thank you, Mrs. Jeon. Because of you, I found this path. I'm finally saying what I wanted to say.

The goal: four hours a day of talking, texting and writing. Did I hit it every day? No. Most days I felt too uncomfortable to talk, so I didn't.

But by August I had so many language exchange partners. You start with one person, you get comfortable, and then it just gets easier. A few days before I flew, I spent a whole day out in Korean with one of them, here in the US. My first day lived in Korean.

First day of classes at Yonsei. I was the only foreigner in my politics classes.

After a year of podcasting over the internet, George and I finally met in person, in Seoul, and recorded an episode.

I joined a Yonsei basketball team. Dunked on some Korean boys.

For one of my politics classes, three Korean classmates and I researched why so many young workers in Korea don't get paid minimum wage. We spent November interviewing young workers, wrote the whole report in Korean, and presented it in December.

At the end, everyone wrote a few lines about what they took from it. My classmates wrote theirs in Korean and got to say everything. Mine had to be in English, because I was the foreigner. English takes up way more room on the page, so I got two sentences.

It was the first time politics and Korean were the same thing for me.

Busan, for the film festival. Kalguksu and mandu. Christmas lights in Seoul. You can only learn for so long. This is where it lives.

I flew back to the US. That January I didn't track a single hour. I'd done it.

I felt like a foreign exchange student in my own country. Every rumour, every bit of news, every little thing was new again. Honestly, it felt like I'd left home.

I lied again. Back home, under my Korean name, I took the beginner test one more time. 100 on listening. 100 on reading. Every section, 100%.

Back home, George and I recorded what three years of immersion and life in Korea had taught us. I posted it in Refold, same as always.

Politics was my dream. Not the speeches. Helping people. And with Korean in my life, I started thinking about how I could help Americans and Koreans both.

So working in a U.S. senator's office on Capitol Hill was a big deal for me. And it was fun. I got to work on foreign relations, spent time with Foreign Service officers, and made connections with some pretty awesome people.

I have a few autoimmune conditions, and that fall they caught up with me. My doctor thought it might be cancer. In November I had my whole thyroid removed.

Honestly, the scariest part was the thought of losing my voice. The surgery went well, and it wasn't cancer, just large nodules. I went back to the Hill. I wasn't going to let a surgery stop me.

My term ended, and I had a job offer to stay. I turned it down.

My body hadn't caught up yet. I didn't feel better until later that year. I needed to step away.

I took my family on a trip around Korea. Walked around with my brother. Some very funny photos with my mom.

My mom had been there when I first landed in 2022. For my dad, it was the first time. All those crazy hours of me in my room, Korean playing through the whole house, and now he got to see what they turned into: me taking care of them, giving them the best tour of every place I'd wanted to show them.

And I got to see my boy George again. That night my brother, George and I went out for tonkatsu. Such a good day.

I asked myself what I could give people for free. The answer was a plan. So I started getting on the phone with language learners every single week: what they do, what they don't, what they want to do, where they're stuck.

I've talked with hundreds of learners. I found myself saying most of the same things. Almost everything came down to a few questions nobody had answered for them.

And I watched the same thing happen again and again: a great plan, and then nothing. The gap between a plan and a goal is action.

I didn't know language Twitter even existed. Then the newsletters, basically every day.

I shared my website. A newsletter every Saturday, and free tools for learners. The first one was a calculator.

I made a picture of a calculator on a pink background. Tell it your goals, your life and your level, and it works out your immersion. That calculator is what Immersed grew out of. It's still here: it's the free blueprint.

I almost made Aim a Korean magpie. There's something special about Duolingo's owl, so I spent the whole day studying how Duolingo designs its characters. I read their design blog and screenshotted everything.

I fell in love with their design team that day.

The calculator went up as ImmersionCalc. Every answer got its own insight, which I wrote myself. At the end you got a mission, a power level and a plan.

People on iPhones started sending me screenshots of bugs. On December 2 I started posting on Threads, and by January about 10,000 people were following along.

February is when I really went in. The immersion library. Storing links, because I wanted to show people what I'd actually watched. Every cool thing I saw, I added.

On March 20 I released a book for K-pop fans for BTS's comeback. My first internet money.

YouTube removed my channel, the one I used to share resources with learners. Spam, deceptive practices and scams, the email said. I appealed that morning. By the afternoon: denied. I tried again in August. "We won't be putting your channel back up on YouTube."

So the app became the only way left to share what I know. I started building it to do what YouTube wouldn't let me.

I found Structured, and the idea of a timeline finally clicked. A drawer for the things you want to do, cards I finally loved, full screen, an inbox. All in one week.

Bugs on bugs. The first time I felt like I was really living Game Dev Tycoon.

The Immersion Intensity Calculator got a new name: Immersed. The little guy in the logo still didn't have one.

A friend sat on a call and told me every reason he wouldn't use my app. It was enough for me to finally say: Ademola, get rid of everything.

As good as it all was, it's useless if people feel overwhelmed. The timeline settled. The rest got cut or moved.

A new home page, a Discord, and sessions that play your link right inside the app. Version 1.2.