Learn Korean With These Hand-selected Korean Flashcard Decks

So you learned Hangul, it went pretty smoothly, you got to asking yourself how hard could it really be to learn Korean?, and now you're balking at the fact that several thousand vocabulary words stand between you and a subtitle-less K-drama binge.

(Or maybe you're procrastinating on learning Korean by looking at resources. I get that 🫡)

Anyway—to make this post, I clicked through nearly 400 free Korean Anki decks, downloaded the ones that looked promising, and then took notes on the best ones so I could introduce them to you.

Let's do this:

[Setup] What Anki is, how to install it, and how to download Korean Anki decks

On the off-chance that you just recently heard somebody talking about Anki on Discord or something, we'll take a small detour to help you get everything set up.

How Anki flashcards and spaced repetition make your life easier

Anki is a flashcard application. Some people go ham with it, but, at its core, it's literally just an application for doing flashcards on your phone or computer.

Why not make your own flashcards by hand?

Two main reasons:

Spaced repetition and memory is a pretty big topic, and this post is mainly about sharing useful Anki decks, so I'll skip that discussion for now. We've got an entire blog post about it, if you're interested. (If you're new to Anki, I highly recommend taking 10 minutes to skim it.)

How to install Anki

Anki is just an ordinary app/program, so there aren't any hoops you need to jump through. We have a very detailed walkthrough here, if you want one.

Otherwise:

To download decks and make use of the apps, you'll also need to register on Anki's website. This is free, too.

And now for the fun stuff!

How to install Korean Anki Decks from Ankiweb

First, log into your Anki account. Next, click here to visit Anki's "Shared Decks" page. This is where all of the "official" decks of Korean flashcards are stored—things that other people have made and (generously) decided to make publicly available for free.

I'll link directly to Anki decks I've vetted and recommend in the below sections, but there's a lot of stuff here. Feel free to explore!

Anyway!

To install an Anki deck, make sure you're on the deck's landing page and then click the blue "Download" button located between the preview section and comments section.

Now, on your desktop, open Anki. In the bottom-right corner of the app, click "Import File". Find the deck in your downloads folder (it will end in .apkg, which )

Now open Anki. Click "Import File", find the deck you downloaded (it will end in .apkg, which is a special file format used for Anki decks), and then click "Open" to import it:

Anki handles everything else. It'll take a bit of time to import—especially if your deck has a lot of images or audio—and then it'll appear in Anki. From here, you can take a moment to move the deck, rename it, and do any general housekeeping you want.

Once you're happy, it's time to sync the deck. This will enable you to use it on your mobile device.

Voila!

One last thing worth mentioning—notice how, in the bottom-right corner of the third image, there's a spinning wheel of death next to the Synchronize button? That means that files are being downloaded in the background.

In order to let you use the flashcards as soon as possible, Anki will initially download all of the text content of your flashcards. From here, Anki will proceed downloading any audio or video files that might be attached to your Anki cards.

You can study your new deck of Anki cards as soon as the text data finishes downloading, but images/audio will not be available until they finish downloading. As such, if you're expecting media but don't see anything, give it half an hour or so.

Once it's done, you'll be ready to get started.

Which leads me to...

[Soapbox] The "best" Korean flashcard deck should meet 6 conditions

Bear with me for a moment. I'm going to be blunt.

I normally try to be more positive in my blog posts, but you're potentially going to invest hundreds of hours into these decks over the course of a few years, so I think being strict is warranted. I don't want you to waste your time—even if you go with a product that isn't Migaku.

You see, ideally, a "good" deck should meet six important criteria:

With this context now established, remember how I said I looked through like four hundred decks?

I found just one single deck that met all of the above criteria.

... but it didn't have notes, had audio on the front instead of Korean text, and had some minor word choice mistakes that were evident within the first few flashcards. It only gets a diagonal thumbs up, not a boldly proud and erect one.

Anyway.

I've got one more detour to make, then I'm going to share the best decks I found. I'm happy to say that I did find some cool ones. Nevertheless—if you happen to stumble into a deck that meets all the above criteria, use that deck. That's a beauty of a deck.

From my soapbox I shall now descend.

Three things you should know to use Anki effectively

Just a few bits of hygiene before we get into the bulk of the post.

Listen: Anki is awesome. If you've never used it before, your life is going to change.

But, please know that:

More specifically, there are three main ways that beginners go wrong with Anki:

And now, without further ado, let's begin the resource dump:

1. A deck for learning Hangul, so you can actually read Korean

Naturally, if you're just beginning to learn Korean, your first step is learning to read hangul. Not knowing hangul severely limits your options to learn Korean (as even beginner resources feature sentences written in hangul) and to enjoy Korean (as subtitles, webtoons, books, and any content intended for Koreans is obviously written in hangul).

I'm pretty happy to say that there's a solid Anki deck to help you make this first step.

This lets you learn hangul by attaching sounds to symbols, an approach I think is simple and effective.

Where this deck falls short is that Korean spelling rules are pretty complicated. We go into this in more detail in our introduction to hangul, but many Korean letters can make two or three different sounds: one if they appear at the beginning of the word, another if they appear in the middle or end of a word.

The above deck doesn't make these differences clear... but, thankfully, I found one that does, shown below. It includes phonetic transcriptions of how a hangul sounds when it appears in different parts of a word, and it also includes some solid notes that will help you learn to make difficult sounds or to differentiate similar ones.

I recommend going quickly through the first deck, just to get an initial idea of how each hangul sounds and thus enabling you to begin exploring a wider variety of Korean resources—then working more slowly through this second deck, to fill in holes in your knowledge.

... or, you can just do Migaku's Korean Fundamentals course

Migaku also has a flashcard-based hangul course, and it consolidates the best elements of the above two decks.

You'll learn sounds by first reading a description of how they work, as in the second deck, then take the same "see the symbol → hear the sound approach" as in the first deck. We also include a video of a native speaker saying each sound so you can observe how their lips move.

Then, once you've learned the hangul, we go on to talk about all of the various sound change rules in Korean. You'll learn them in the same way: read an explanation to see how a sound change works, then commit it to memory by learning words which feature the sound change in question.

Migaku is free for 10 days, and that's enough time to learn hangul and dip your toes into Korean's sound changes if you learn at a pace of 15 cards per day.

2. A deck with audio for Korean pronunciation practice via minimal pairs

While hangul are logical and easy to learn in theory, they're somewhat difficult to use in practice. Many hangul have multiple sounds associated with them, and Korean has several different sounds that English speakers will struggle to differentiate.

For example, Korean has five "P" sounds:

And that's where this deck comes into play!

It consists of over 500 minimal pairs. You can see what this means in the below picture: an audio recording plays, then you're asked if you heard 벌벌 (normal P) or 펄펄 (strong P). You flip the card over and see the answer.

This deck includes a wide variety of listening tests for both consonants and vowels. You can just plug away at it slowly over time, doing two or three cards per day, gradually polishing your ears and learning to reliably distinguish every single sound in Korean.

The only thing I would personally add to make this deck even better is (a) to include recordings from multiple speakers and (b) to show recordings for both options on the back side, so you can compare them in context.

All in all, this is an excellent deck that I'm excited to share.

3. A deck for learning common Korean vocabulary words

I'm going to be honest: this section gave me a small identity crisis.

You see, I don't recommend using this deck. It goes against so many of the Golden Rules of Good Flashcards™ that I introduced above.

... at the same time, it's important to know your audience. I can't deny that, looking at Korean Discord communities, Reddit's r/KoreanLanguage, and Anki's most popular shared Korean decks, it's apparent that Korean learners seem to be attracted to the idea of drilling lists of words.

So, if that's you, please use this deck.

As such, while I don't think this deck is the best use of your time, it won't hurt you, either.

I do feel comfortable recommending this deck to one specific type of learner: someone who has just finished learning hangul, is feeling a bit overwhelmed, and just wants a bit more practice with the Korean alphabet before beginning to learn vocabulary via decks of sentences.

If that's you, go ahead and use this deck. I don't think you should finish it, but you can't go wrong with using it to learn 50–100 common words before jumping into a deck of sentences.

4. Two solid decks of Korean sentences

As with the hangul decks, while I couldn't quite find one deck that had everything I wanted, I did find two solid decks of Korean sentences that I feel comfortable recommending for different reasons.

The first deck is the most popular deck on the page of public Korean Anki decks for a reason. It's just solid all around. You start with sentences that consist of very simple words, and these sentences gradually get longer and more complex as you go. By the time you finish the ~2,500 cards, you'll have covered all the grammar you need to pass the TOPIK 4 exam.

(This is technically a grammar deck, but it has only very brief grammar notes that are few and far between, so I think it's better suited as a typical sentences deck.)

The next deck is so close to being perfect that it hurts a bit. The deck is organized by vocabulary frequency—you learn the most common words first—and it's organized such that each card introduces only one new piece of information (the word it teaches). It also forces you to think a bit—to see a translation, you have to click a button. (Research shows that simply trying to remember information leads to better retention, whether you successfully remember or not.)

It's got audio and the full series consists of 7,000 words, so you could realistically coast through this deck from zero to early-advanced. It's awesome.

Unfortunately, it doesn't get my full-fledged recommendation for three reasons:

Anyway:

5. A crash-course in Korean grammar in a deck of flashcards

I should preface this by saying that grammar isn't the sort of thing you learn once and are done with. Grammar points are acquired in several stages:

Basically, grammar is kind of like the leaves of a tree. It doesn't make much sense to worry about the leaves until your trunk is sturdy and it's got some solid branches growing.

That's where this deck comes into play.

This deck is awesome for somebody that's around stage two or three, as outlined above.

As a result, this deck is an excellent way to consolidate your knowledge of and put a name to grammatical structures you encounter while consuming Korean content.

Whereas other grammar decks on the shared page—such as this one or this one—pack so much information into each card that they're frankly unusable, this one achieves a wonderful balance. Each flashcard has a specific thing it wants you to learn, and that takeaway is always clear and practical.

... on the off chance you know Japanese already

... Alternatively, Migaku's Korean Academy course is a combined vocab-sentence-grammar deck

Plugging yourself is always awkward, but from one learner to another, Migaku's Korean Academy is by far the best way to start learning Korean.

The full course teaches you about 300 grammar points and the 1,300 words that appear most commonly in Netflix subtitles. These aren't just any words, either: we targeted specifically the words you need to recognize 80% of the words that appear in Netflix's subtitles.

Again, self-plugging and whatnot, but it's an awesome deck. It takes the best points of the sentences and grammar decks shared above and combines them into one beautiful package.

6. A deck to learn hanja, the Chinese characters used in Korean

So, long story—go check out our post on the history of the Korean alphabet—but Korean used to use Chinese characters. They no longer do, but a massive amount of Korean words were borrowed directly from Chinese, and the "logic" of these Chinese characters is still there, just under the surface.

For example, you'll notice the syllable 학 in many words related to school or knowledge. This isn't a coincidence—it comes from the Chinese character 學, which means "to study" or "to learn". As a result, if you know Hanja:

Kind handy, kinda cool, huh?

Now, you definitely don't need to learn hanja to learn Korean. Even Korean natives themselves won't usually know more than the most basic hanja—the ones used in their name, and then several characters like "big" or "small" that sometimes appear on signs/menus.

... but if you think hanja are cool, or you want to study Japanese or Mandarin someday, or maybe you're an advanced learner who is looking for a new challenge—there's an awesome deck for that.

The deck is entirely in Korean, so it's not for beginners. The characters also aren't organized in a particularly useful way. Nevertheless, each one comes with etymological notes, a mnemonic to help you remember the character, and an example vocabulary word that the character appears in.

7. The best deck for intermediate Korean learners

We need to drop some cold hard statistics here.

If you're nearing the end of the beginner level, it's essential to understand that words are not used equally often:

The reason for this apparently exponential curve is that knowledge is domain specific—a word like carburetor will appear quite commonly in discussions about cars, but will virtually never appear in any other context. In other words, the word is important if you're interested in cars... and basically useless if you aren't.

But how do you know whether a word will or won't be useful, given your personal goals for learning Korean?

The answer is simple: Make your own deck of flashcards by extracting sentences from media you personally enjoy.

For example, I'm learning Korean because I love Korean webtoons. So, here you can see me reading Sweet Home, an awesome comic that recently became a hit Netflix series.

I ran into a word I didn't know—그나저나, "anyhow"—so I decided to make a flashcard out of it.

The whole process took about two seconds, and you can see the results below. (I speak Japanese, so my notes are in Japanese).

It takes a long time to learn Korean... but since the vast majority of the journey basically boils down to consuming Korean media that you enjoy and capitalizing on learning opportunities as you encounter them, it's also a largely enjoyable process.

You can do all this on Anki, but it requires you to install like five different open-source tools from GitHub and juggle them. That's kind of complicated and beyond the scope of this video... but, if it's something you're interested in, here's a ~30-minute tutorial on how to sentence mine with Anki.

If you'd prefer to skip the hassle and make flashcards in two seconds →

8. Two random fun decks

This has been a pretty long, serious, and picky blog post... so I wanted to wrap up with a couple of fun decks. After all, everybody needs a random side project sometimes.

The first deck is for learning Korean geography. It's beautiful, frankly. The front of each flashcard is a highlighted portion of a Korean map, then the back is the name of that region plus some basic notes about it.

The next deck is for foodies. The front of each card is the name of a Korean food, and then the back of each card has a picture of that food plus an English translation.

Neither deck is super practical and shouldn't be what you start with as a beginner... but they're only about a hundred cards each, so they're things you could knock out during a slow month.

9. Two honorable mentions

The final-final two decks I have are things that I wanted to share, but ultimately decided against.

The first deck is a condensed version of Naver Today's Korean, a platform which uploads a brief Korean dialogue every day alongside grammar notes and an English translation. The desk is really cool, but it's not really appropriate for learners for two reasons:

Both of these factors mean that each card will likely contain multiple pieces of new information for earlier learners, which is a guarantee that the cards will be frustrating and ineffective. Nevertheless, if you're pretty well into the intermediate stages of Korean, this deck could be a great way for you to consolidate your knowledge of common grammar points.

The second deck is something that somebody put a lot of love into—a linguist who created their "dream resource". Each card features an example sentence, hanja if available, and a recording from native Korean speakers.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend it to most learners for three reasons:

All the same, it's a beautiful deck, and a good demonstration of the cool things you can do with Anki if you put in the time to learn how the program works.

The #1 thing to remember if you want to learn Korean

Wrapping up, I'd like to bestow upon you the Golden Rule of Flashcards:

It's going to take a while to learn Korean, and flashcards will be an important tool as you embark on that journey. They enable you to learn faster and they also ensure that you'll remember what you learn.

The good news is that languages are things that we learn by doing: a lot of your Korean progress will come as a byproduct of doing things you enjoy in Korean.

In other words, you don't need to get fluent before you can start doing cool things in Korean. On the contrary, you become fluent in Korean by doing cool things in Korean.

Anyway, I'll get out of your hair now.

Go grind your flashcards and do something cool in Korean!