From Liverpool to London, Korean exchange student wins hearts with talent for accents

08 Feb 2018

“Bloody hell”, “you right” and “take the piss” are all British sayings – perhaps best explained by one YouTuber native to Seoul, South Korea.

Born Seong-Jae Kong, Korean Billy has gained 80,000 subscribers and plenty of his videos have racked up more than half a million views.

In 2015, Billy attended the University of Central Lancashire for a semester as an exchange student. He has made YouTube videos ever since, taking off accents and “dialects” from London street slang to Glaswegian, Northern Irish to scouse from Liverpool.

Bumped into Becky from @CambridgeUPELT in Seoul! What an amazing coincidence! pic.twitter.com/JUjBy18CZs

— Korean Billy (@KoreanBilly) January 31, 2018

It has made him a darling of the British press ever since, being featured by the iconic BBC several times as well as local newspapers across the country. The Guardian even asked him to write a guide on local slang for international students in 2017.

“While going to UCLAN as an exchange student, I met a lot of classmates from Liverpool and found their scouse accent fascinating. That’s how I got really interested in the Scouse dialect and they taught me how to speak scouse,” Billy told the Liverpool Echo.

“When I went to the UK two years ago as an exchange student, I heard Northern accents for the first time and I found them really, really interesting,” he told the BBC last year.

“I think British people find it really, really interesting and funny that a random Korean guy does different sorts of British dialects. Scouse made me more interested in British dialects and made me learn more about British dialects and British culture.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEnYRbNjUrk

As he continues to make videos, Billy has branched out into American accents including Texan slang. This recently scored him a write-up in Texas Monthly magazine.

After graduating several years ago, Billy says he dreams of eventually becoming a broadcast or multimedia journalist in the UK.

This article originally appeared on our sister website Asian Correspondent