Tran Thi Huong Ly (25), the grand prize winner of the "28th World Foreigner Korean Speech Contest" jointly hosted by Kyung Hee University's Institute of International Education and the national news agency Yonhap News on the 15th, repeatedly said, "I never imagined I would receive such a big award."

Originally from Vietnam, Tran Thi Huong Ly received the highest score from the judges by fluently explaining "neun geot gatda" (it seems like), a commonly used Korean expression, as the "mild flavor of the Korean language" used cautiously to avoid hurting others.

Tran Thi Huong Ly was born and raised in Thai Nguyen, northern Vietnam. Since childhood, she developed an interest in the Korean language and culture through K-pop and K-dramas. She first came to Korea in November 2019 to study as a language trainee at Daegu University and subsequently entered the same university's Department of Korean Language Education.

She is currently studying "Korean Education as a Foreign Language" in the graduate school at Yeungnam University while also working as an instructor at the Korean Language Education Center affiliated with Gyeongil University.

The topic for this contest also originated from her Korean language class. There was a question she particularly received often in class: Why do Koreans use "-neun geot gatda" so much?

"A student said, 'Teacher, but I know for sure, why do you keep using a conjectural expression?' I was flustered," she recalled.

She said she kept searching for the reason, concluding, "Koreans seem to be gentler than people think. It seems they express things cautiously, twisting their words somehow so as not to hurt the other person."

"Being in the same Asian cultural sphere, there are bound to be indirect ways of speaking, but no matter how deeply I look into Vietnamese, I don't think there are expressions as profoundly indirect as in Korean."

Tran Thi Huong Ly herself has also come to use "-neun geot gatda" frequently. With a smile, she said, "Listening to it every day makes me use it every day. Even when writing a thesis or having a consultation and conversation with a professor, I keep using the expression '-neun geot gatda'."

Tran Thi Huong Ly is both a Korean language teacher and a foreigner studying Korean.

She shared, "Because I am also a foreigner, I utilize my own experience to think of various ways on how to help students empathize without finding it difficult."

As the part of Korean that students find particularly difficult, she picked passive and causative verbs.

She noted that while Vietnamese also has passive expressions, they are not used as extensively as in Korean.

Stating that she plans to enter a doctoral program next March, Tran Thi Huong Ly expressed her commitment, saying, "I really love this path of studying the Korean language and plan to keep walking it."

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