Students Testimonials from the Yale College Student Course Evaluations

• My level of proficiency in Korean definitely increased, and it wasn’t too difficult to pick it back up after I had taken a semester off of Korean. The class discussions were always very lively and helped my improve my fluency.
• K140 is a wondeful course. It stresses speaking proficiency especially while not neglecting written proficiency as well.
• If there is one thing I regret from my 4 years here at Yale, it would be not taking Korean earlier. I enjoyed starting my days off with the bright and bubble Professor Lee and my classmates. It was truly a great cultural and language learning experience.
• A strength of the course was the structure that worksheets provided. I always left class feeling like I learned something new.
• I really enjoyed the course. I learned a lot of new vocabularies and grammar. We were given homework everyday but it was not overwhelming.
• I vastly improved my Korean speaking skill and the professor is very empathetic and considerate to the workload and troubles, academic or personal, of students.
• KREN 140 is a great class! To be honest, I have enjoyed taking Korean for the past four semesters and it always makes me sad that the Korean department at Yale is so small! Other than a L5 class, there isn’t much that I can take after this, despite my interest in all things Korea. The class itself was awesome, and I was happy that we spent more time on speaking skills rather than learning stuff out of a textbook. Class was fun and spent practicing language in interesting scenarios with the classmates.
• Phenomenal. Thank you!
• Professor Lee-Smith is the reason why learning Korean is so easily facilitated and enjoyable. She creates a comfortable class environment and has incredibly strong relationships to her students through class and through home-cooking at language table every week.
• Cooking in Friday’s language table was so much fun and memorable, too.
• She is very positive and is always looking for better ways to teach us and help out. If we don’t understand something, she makes an effort to make sure we get it.
• Her style of teaching is encouraging. I had previously had her for L01 Korean and I must repeat that she is an amazing professor. She knows how to push people to try harder and learn more. She also knows when to insert little jokes and make class enjoyable. I particularly enjoy the Korean language tables where I got to meet the Heritage Korean L4 classmates.
• She is very bright and cheerful everyday so she always sets a positive atmosphere to the class. She is also very understanding.
• After hearing so much about Prof. Lee the past three semesters, I finally got to take a class with her. The verdict: Prof. Lee is awesome! Super helpful, attentive to our class, adapts the curriculum to what we need / want to learn, and makes amazing Korean food for us and the heritage Korean class. Assignments and exam topics were crystal clear, she was understanding if you had to miss class because of sickness/concussion/etc.