Built by someone who needed it first
I'm Cedric Draghici. I was born and raised in Montreal to a Romanian family, so French, English and Romanian were all just there from the start, one at school, one around the city, one at home. Growing up switching between them is where the interest began. Those three arrived with the city and the family. Korean was the first one I went looking for.
It started with K-pop and K-dramas
Like a lot of people, I got here through music and television. What began as a hobby, listening to K-pop and watching K-dramas, turned into something I wanted to do properly. I took Korean for two years at McGill University and worked my way through every Korean language course they offered, and somewhere in there the language stopped being a hobby and became a way into the culture.
"Read the newspaper"
When I finished the last course, I asked my professor what I could do to keep my Korean from slipping away. Her answer was simple: read the newspaper.
So I did. The reading was never the problem. Everything around the reading was.
A single article went like this. Screenshot the page. Open the screenshot in an annotation app. Hit a word I didn't know, alt-tab to Papago, look it up, come back, write the meaning above the word by hand. Repeat, forty or fifty times, until the page was covered in my handwriting.
What I ended up with was an iPad full of annotated screenshots and no way to review them. Two weeks later I had forgotten the words, and the screenshots were just pictures I never opened again. An hour of work per article, and nothing that lasted.
So I built the thing I wanted
Sori is that whole process collapsed into a highlight. You read the article on the actual page. Highlight a word and the translation or the dictionary definition appears where you are, in context, without a second tab. Press the plus button and the word becomes a flashcard, which comes back later on a schedule built for remembering rather than for filling an iPad with screenshots.
Same article as above, no annotation app, nothing lost two weeks later.
Now: TOPIK
Studying for the TOPIK II, I kept running out of practice. There were only ever a handful of mock tests and questions, when what I wanted was dozens of mock tests to work through, and a way to drill each type of question on its own. The IBT made it harder still: it is so new that I could not find material in its exact format anywhere.
So I started building it myself, and Sori is becoming a TOPIK prep app.
