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Korean

Hangul takes a weekend. The next part is where people stall.

Reading the letters was never the hard bit. Particles, verb endings and knowing which politeness level you are in are what stand between you and a real article, and those only come from meeting them again and again in something you want to finish.

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한국어

Why it stalls

Everything hangs off the end of the word.

Korean puts the work in endings and particles, so the same verb stem arrives in a dozen shapes and a dictionary lookup on the form in front of you often returns nothing at all. Add speech levels, where the same sentence has a polite, a casual and a formal version, and you get learners who can read every letter on the page and still not know what they are looking at.

On the page

What actually helps here

There is no pronunciation layer to add: hangul already tells you how a word sounds, which is the one genuinely easy thing about Korean. So the reader spends its effort on the parts that are hard.

  • Tap a word in the form it appears in and get the meaning it carries there, rather than a dictionary entry for a stem you would have to work back to yourself.

  • Ask the tutor why an ending is what it is, in plain English, about the sentence in front of you. Why this politeness level, why 은 and not 는.

  • Hear it before you guess it. Where a piece has audio, the sentence being spoken is highlighted as it goes, which is the fastest way to stop reading Korean as if it were spelled the way it is written.

One tap

The word answers you where it stands.

Not the first entry in a dictionary list, but what the word is doing in this sentence. Hear it, ask about it, or save it, without leaving the line you were reading.

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So it sticks

Every word you save comes back at the right moment.

Saved words join a review queue built on spaced repetition, and each one keeps the sentence you met it in. Your Korean queue is its own: learn three languages at once and none of them bleed into the others.

How the review works

Korean

Questions worth asking first.

Do I need hangul before I start?
Yes, and it is genuinely a weekend of work. Everything else in Korean is harder than the alphabet, and starting before you have it means fighting the letters instead of the language.
Will it help with speech levels?
Reading widely is what builds the instinct, because you meet 해요 and 합니다 in the situations that call for them rather than in a table. Where you want the rule stated outright, the tutor knows the passage you are reading and will explain why that ending is the one being used.
Can I use K-pop lyrics or dramas?
Lyrics yes, and songs are in the library with the recording. For video, paste a YouTube link and read the transcript along with it. Whether a given drama has one depends on the video.

More in the help pages.

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