I came to Korea to learn Korean. I ended up learning about the world

When I moved to Seoul to study Korean, I expected my education to be about Korea. I imagined improving my Korean, learning more about Korean society and gaining a deeper understanding of a country in which I hoped to build a future.

What I did not expect was that studying Korean would teach me so much about the rest of the world.

At times, my classroom at Korea University’s Korean Language Center has felt like a miniature United Nations. Over the past year, I have studied alongside people from countries including Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia and Turkey.

I grew up in Australia and New Zealand, but these were places I had relatively little exposure to. But I realized multiculturalism has a geography. Migration patterns, geography and history inevitably shape which cultures we encounter in our everyday lives.

Korea's geographic proximity to Central and Northeast Asia and its growing cultural influence and educational opportunities bring together students who might otherwise have had little reason to cross paths. Our common goal is to learn Korean, but we also became each other's teachers.

Some of what I have learned has been simple. Before coming here, for example, I did not realise how widely Russian is spoken in Kazakhstan and other parts of the former Soviet Union. Other conversations have introduced me to histories and identities that I previously knew almost nothing about.

One of the most fascinating examples has been learning about the Koryo-in, ethnic Koreans from the former Soviet Union. Through them and in their communities, I began to learn about their complex history of migration, displacement and identity.

Their experiences also made me think about my own. As an ethnic Chinese person who grew up in a multicultural environment in Australia and New Zealand, I found something familiar in conversations about an ancestral identity connected to one country while being culturally shaped by another. Our histories are very different, yet those conversations reminded me that questions such as "Where are you from?" and "Where do you belong?" rarely have simple answers.

As our Korean has become more advanced, our textbooks have moved beyond to discussing politics, law, social issues, education, cultural traditions and social values. A lesson about Korea's political system, for example, can quickly become a discussion about how governments work in our own countries.

I was reminded of this when I interviewed one of my Korean teachers. When I asked what she enjoyed most about teaching at the center, one of her answers stayed with me. Teaching gave her the opportunity to listen to students and learn about cultures and countries around the world.

I had always assumed that we were the ones coming to Korea to learn. I had not thought as much about the exchange happening in the other direction. Her answer made me realise that an international classroom does not really have a single teacher or a single direction in which knowledge flows.

Perhaps that is the greatest value of learning in an international classroom. You begin by noticing obvious differences in food, languages, holidays and customs. Eventually, however, you encounter deeper ones in how people think about family, education, identity, success and the way a life should be lived.

International education is often described as an exchange between a student and a host country. I came to Korea and certainly learned about Korea. But I have also learned about Kazakhstan from Kazakhs, Mongolia from Mongolians and other countries from classmates who grew up there. They, in turn, have heard about Australia, New Zealand and China through people like me. Korean, strangely enough, has often been the language through which these conversations have taken place.

I came to Seoul expecting Korean to open a door into Korea. I did not expect so many doors to the rest of the world would also open.

Geoffrey Chen (gywchen@gmail.com) is a former corporate lawyer from Australia currently studying Korean at Korea University in Seoul.