KakaoTalk App

Yo!

 Once in Seoul you’ll definitely want to communicate with your fellow exchange students and newly made Korean chingus (friends). For this, I want to take this time to recommend an indispensable little app by the name of KakaoTalk.

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Now, if you have ever used any apps like Viber, Line, or What’sApp, then you probably already have an idea of what KakaoTalk does. For those of you who haven’t, I’ll take this time to describe what it is and why you definitely need it while in Korea, especially for you students.

 KakaoTalk, at its most basic, is a messaging app for your phone. It allows you to send messages, create chat groups, share multimedia such as picture and videos, make calls over your data connection, and even attach files on your message threads that chat members can then download. It also has a wide variety of creative emoticons and other personalization features. You can also install a version of KakaoTalk to your computer and sync it to your phone version. It is essentially an app like What’sApp, but just a Korean company’s version. Overall, the app is very easy to use, however the calls placed through it are not the best quality.

If you want to communicate with any of your college friends in Seoul, or Korea in general, then you’ll need this app. The way I had it explained to me is that, to college students in Korea, messaging and phone minutes are very expensive so they use KakaoTalk to communicate over their data plans and from what I experienced, almost every Korean student I met used KakaoTalk. Whenever it came time to exchange contact information, it was always a Kakao ID that was given and only once did I exchange phone numbers. Almost all communication between project groups, that Korean students were a part of, was done on KakaoTalk. Another reason that I recommend that you get KakaoTalk is just how widespread it is in marketing and culture in Korea. The KakaoTalk emoticons are present on everything from billboards to candy wrappers to product labels. KakaoTalk is also widely used by Korean companies to share promotions, put forth interactive campaigns, and even by Kpop groups to communicate with their fans.

Bottom line, if you want to be able to communicate with your friends in Seoul, I recommend you download KakaoTalk. After all, everyone there uses it so you will probably need to also.

The app is available for free (to buy and to use) on the Google Play Store, the App Store, and you can get it for your computer here.