Trisha Paytas has no Korean heritage and no prior reputation as a K-pop act, which is part of why it was news at all when the American singer and influencer released a roughly two-minute track called “사랑해” — “I Love You” — with every line of its lyrics written and sung in Korean: “어두운 밤 별빛 아래 그대 생각에 잠 못 들어” (“On a dark night under starlight, I can’t sleep for thinking of you”), “사랑해, 사랑해 천 번을 말해도 부족해” (“I love you, I love you, a thousand times still isn’t enough”). The song climbed into the upper reaches of the U.S. iTunes K-pop chart, and Korean outlets covering it flagged the same detail: a foreign artist building a song entirely around Korean-language lyrics, rather than dropping in a phrase or two, is still rare enough to be a story in itself.
It’s also a small, individual data point sitting on top of a much larger trend with its own paper trail. Duolingo’s 2025 Language Report ranks Korean as the sixth most-studied language on its platform worldwide, behind only English, Spanish, French, Japanese and German. And inside Korea’s own school-age data, the growth is even sharper: according to figures the Ministry of Education submitted to Rep. Kim Moon-soo of the National Assembly’s Education Committee, reported by Hankyung’s Ko Jae-yeon on May 10, the number of overseas elementary and secondary schools running Korean-language classes hit 2,777 by the end of 2025 — up 9.9 percent from the year before, and up 54 percent from 1,806 schools in 2021.
The student numbers tell the same story from a different angle: 236,089 students were studying Korean in those classrooms in 2025, up 38 percent from 170,563 in 2021, spread across 47 countries, five more than four years earlier. The single biggest gainer over the past year was Uzbekistan, which added 68 new Korean-language classrooms, followed by Sri Lanka (43), Vietnam (37), the Philippines (26), Brazil (24) and the United States (21). At the other end of the list, countries including the Czech Republic, Italy, Norway, Georgia, Ethiopia, Moldova and Turkmenistan each had exactly one school offering Korean — proof the wave has reached almost everywhere, even if it’s only just landed in some places.
None of this is happening passively from Korea’s side. The government subsidizes the operating costs of these overseas Korean-language classes, supplies textbooks and trains local teachers to staff them. Education Minister Choi Gyo-jin visited the Philippines and Vietnam in March specifically to pledge continued “Korean language education support,” according to the same Hankyung report. Kim, the lawmaker who released the underlying data, used it to argue for more, not less: “Budget for the overseas elementary and secondary school Korean-language adoption support project needs to keep increasing steadily for the globalization of Korean,” he said.
What the enrollment numbers don’t capture is how hard the language actually is to learn once a student is past the alphabet. Asia Economy Daily’s Heo Mi-dam, writing June 14 in the outlet’s “K-Holic” series, noted that the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute classified Korean back in 2017 — alongside Chinese, Japanese and Arabic — in its hardest category for native English speakers, citing Hangul’s unfamiliar writing system, a dense web of honorifics that shift with age and relationship, and a subject-object-verb sentence order that runs backward from English. That hasn’t slowed the workaround culture springing up to deal with it: on YouTube and TikTok, videos that romanize K-pop lyrics so fans can sing along phonetically, alongside clips breaking down everyday grammar and slang, routinely rack up large view counts from people with no formal class enrollment at all.
Clayton Dube, the former director of the University of Southern California’s U.S.-China Institute, put a blunter frame on the whole trend in comments to the South China Morning Post last year, cited in Heo’s piece: Korean, he said, is currently the most popular language in East Asia, and the force driving that “is 100 percent K-pop.” If that’s the real engine, then the spreadsheet of 2,777 schools and 236,000 students is less a story about language education policy succeeding on its own terms than about how far one country’s entertainment exports can now reach into things as formal as a foreign ministry’s curriculum decisions — with an American influencer’s two-minute Korean single as just the latest, oddest proof of how far the pull extends.
Sources: Ko Jae-yeon, “해외 한국어 교실 4년새 54% 급증” (“Overseas Korean-Language Classrooms Surge 54% in Four Years”), Hankyung (The Korea Economic Daily), May 10, 2026. Heo Mi-dam, “‘BTS 가사 뜻 알고 싶어요’…외국인들, 한국어 공부하는 이유[K홀릭]” (“‘I Want to Know What BTS’s Lyrics Mean’: Why Foreigners Are Studying Korean”), Asia Economy Daily, June 14, 2026.
