About

This site answers the practical questions about Korea. Getting online, getting around, paying for things, dealing with the paperwork nobody warns you about.

Who writes this

My name is Jayden Hwang. I live in Incheon and I have spent the last two years studying AI, which is a roundabout way of arriving at the question this site is built on: can a machine be made to prove it actually read the source?

Most of what you read here is drafted by a program I wrote. I am telling you that in the third paragraph rather than burying it, because the interesting part is not that a machine writes the draft. It is what the draft has to survive before it becomes a page. Every source is fetched again at publication time and every figure in the text is matched against what comes back. A number that is not in a source it cites does not get softened or footnoted. It stops the publication. On the days nothing clears that bar, nothing goes out.

What is left to me is the part the checker cannot do. It can tell whether a number appears in the source. It cannot tell whether the source was misread, whether a notice is three years stale, or whether the question was worth answering at all. So I read what gets published, and my name is on it because the mistakes it makes are mine. If you find one, tell me. The full method is on how we check.

Choosing what to answer next is a separate problem, and I use a small command-line tool of my own to help with it. It reads search volume and advertiser bid ranges from Google's keyword data for subjects this site already covers, and writes them to a file on my laptop. It runs on my own advertising account, it creates and changes nothing there, and none of what it returns is published here. It tells me whether a question has an audience before I spend a week on it. It has never been allowed to decide what a page says.

Why bother making another one

There are plenty of English guides to Korea. The problem is that they rot. A fare goes up, a rule changes, an app stops taking foreign cards, and the article that told you otherwise sits there for three more years collecting traffic. Nothing on the page tells you it has gone bad.

So every page here has a verification date on it. Not the publication date. Not a "2026" dropped into the title. The day someone opened the source and read it.

When a number has not been checked, the page says that too. That is the part I care about most, and it is the easiest promise to break quietly.

Where the numbers come from

Most things that change in Korea are announced in Korean. The English version follows late, or never. This site reads the Korean pages directly, which is less impressive than it sounds and mostly just means somebody bothered. Those sources are linked at the bottom of every article, and the Korean ones are tagged KO so you can see exactly where a figure came from.

What that gets you is a page checked against the body that sets the rule. It is not the same as a page checked at the counter, and this site does not yet claim the second. Where somebody has gone and looked, the article says so with the date and the photograph. Where it says nothing, nobody went, and what you are reading is the documents.

How it pays for itself

Some pages carry affiliate links, and those pages say so at the top. They cost you nothing. They also do not get to pick the recommendation. Where the cheapest option pays nothing and the expensive one pays well, the page still says which one is cheaper.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, please say so. A site that stakes everything on being current is only as good as the people who tell it when it slips. Contact.