| Ryan Kulp holds the “Yangmal Game,” a Korean word board game he developed. Courtesy of Ryan Kulp |
By Kwon Mee-yoo
Ryan Kulp, app developer, founder of the social proof marketing platform, fomo.com, and a self-taught musician from Atlanta, recently set foot in a new field ― board games.
Based on his experience of learning Korean, Kulp created a Korean word game named "Yangmal Game."
Growing up in Atlanta, which has a large Korean American population, Kulp was aware of Korea and Korean culture from his friends in orchestras where he played the violin in middle school. "It was always kind of in the back of my mind to learn Korean as a second language," Kulp said during a phone interview with The Korea Times, Tuesday.
Kulp started to teach himself Korean in 2019 and moved to Seoul in 2020 as an app developer, buckling down to learn Korean.
"I started with a lot of tutors. So at one point, I had five tutors and each of them tutored me for one or two hours per week. I had a couple textbooks and I also bought short stories such as 'jeollaedonghwa' (traditional folk tales). I also tried attending a two-week 'eohakdang' (language school) for foreigners. And ultimately and eventually, a few months ago, I started firing all of my tutors and now I just learn alone," he said.
Since the tutors pulled him in different directions, Kulp felt he wasn't making deep progress in any one area and so decided to go at it alone.
"So I do everything from TalkToMeInKorean.com to YouTube videos, K-dramas with captions and flashcards. And I'm getting exposure to more Korean in real life conversation with the different projects I'm working on,” he said.
"Now I'm able to be more agile. Lately, I've been doing a cooking show ― 'Paik Jong-won's Class' ― so now every week I can wake up and say, 'Okay, what are the words I need for this Friday's episode?' and I have the space and time to do that."
| “Yangmal Game” is a word game using wooden tiles engraved with Korean alphabet characters. Courtesy of Ryan Kulp |
Kulp looked for more enjoyable ways to learn Korean, which is one of the more difficult languages for native English speakers to learn and it led him to invent the “Yangmal Game.” The game's name, “Yangmal,” comes from Kulp's love of puns, because “yangmal” means socks and “mal” means word in Korean.
"My main study mechanism for words is flashcards. Flashcards are as efficient as they are, they're also very boring and painful. When you get to where I'm at now ― I know 7,000 (Korean) words ― every day I have to review 300 or 400 flashcards and it takes the fun out of language,” he said.
"So I was wanting to find a way to have recall of words without having to click a spacebar for viewing flashcards or trying to read an article and hoping that one word you learn is in the article. So the Yangmal Game allows you to practice weird vocabulary you might know, and people love to show what words they know, even native speakers. That's why people like word games like Scrabble."
Yangmal Game is often described as a Korean version of Scrabble, but Kulp said it is closer to a game called Bananagrams.
"Bananagrams also has characters on pieces and you can make words within. But it's a little more freestyle, as you can make up your own rules," Kulp said.
Kulp was a tech entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley, but he wanted to make something tangible this time.
"I knew I wanted to make words with some physical pieces. I'm a software developer, so my usual direction is to try to think how I can make an app. But I was kind of getting tired of software, so I thought: first step, this should be something physical," he said.
In the beginning, Kulp bought some bathroom tiles and wrote 100 characters on them using a marker to create the prototype back in January 2020. To figure out how many letters he should put in the game, Kulp used the best of his coding skills.
"I took all of my flashcard data, all of the words I had, and I wrote a small formula in code. I was able to use my coding skills to strip all of the letters apart from every Korean word and then to (yield) a frequency ratio," he explained. "I could look at my own dictionary of words and say 'giyeok' (ㄱ) is in 8.5 percent of all the words and 'nieun' (ㄴ) is in 4.7 percent. Then I worked backwards on how big should the game be."
| The first edition of “Yangmal Game” comes in a fabric pouch with a drawing of a sock, but Kulp plans to eventually change the packaging into a real sock, using the pun in the game's title. Courtesy of Ryan Kulp. |
At first, there were some 450 game pieces, based on Kulp's calculation of an average word having 2.5 syllables, and each syllable possessing an average of two characters.
"When I got to Korea and started working with Korean people on the game, we reduced the size of the game to 126 characters and improved the ratio a little bit, making some modifications beyond the math and the science,” he said.
Some rules were also tweaked to make the fast-paced game more playable. "One of the biggest things we did was changing the rules so that you can only use nouns. Originally, what made it really difficult to calculate the proper amount of letters was that every verb has 'da' at the end, skewing the ratio," Kulp said.
Yangmal Game chose to publicize the product through crowdfunding, instead of launching its first product directly.
"More than for raising any money, we did crowdfunding as a way to get exposure to people who will give us real feedback, because your friends will always buy what you do. But when you crowdfund, you get to the truth very quickly. And that's what we're after," Kulp said.
"We're going to be sending out all of the games to our supporters in a couple weeks. And we're already talking to some potential distributors to sell in Korea, as well as America, to language learners and 'gyopos' (ethnic Koreans of foreign nationality) people out there."
Kulp and his team also plan to host Yangmal Game nights, depending on the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, to introduce people to the game live as well.
Ultimately, Kulp wants to encourage people to create the things they want and to find the time to do so.
"I think the best way to achieve that is leading by example. So if I can come here, as a foreigner, learn a new language, adopt to a new culture and still create things that people want to listen to or create things that help people, like teaching English on my YouTube videos, or create things that give people entertainment like Yangmal, then I think that will be a good example to encourage other people to do the same thing," Kulp said.