A Korean Language Course That Actually Works

Decided you want to learn Korean so you can watch k-dramas in the original, sing your favorite k-pop songs, and generally do cool stuff... but then found the journey to be more difficult than you expected?

You're not alone.

Here's what goes wrong, plus a straightforward and data-driven approach to achieving intermediate Korean.

Why most learners fail to make any real progress with Korean

There's a ton of apps, textbooks, and approaches to learning Korean nowadays, but the vast majority of learners fail to learn Korean for one of just two reasons:

To solve the first problem, fill out this sentence:

(Research shows that you'll be nearly 3x more likely to follow through if you do.)

Now, to solve the second problem?

If you're doing this alone and are new to language learning, that unfortunately boils down to a lot of trial and error.

... but if you are learning Korean because you want to consume Korean media, the below steps will bring you there.

Step 1: Learn Hangul and correct pronunciation

So, you need to learn Hangul. They look scary at first, but they were actually very intentionally created to be easy to learn. We've got a whole blog post diving into their history. It's pretty cool.

Migaku Korean Fundamentals is a flashcard-based approach to learning Hangul.

Migaku is totally free for 10 days—no need to enter a credit card or any of that funny business—and, at ~15 flashcards per day, you can learn the hangul within that time.

Step 2: Learn Korean's most common 1,500 words

Next, you need to learn about 1,500 words. That sounds like a lot, but it's actually just 4 words a a day for a year—and if you do that with flashcards, it'll only take about fifteen minutes per day. Very doable! It'll be difficult for a few weeks, but become totally automatic before long.

Where things get a bit complicated is that you can't just learn any 1,500 words.

Naturally, you want to learn these words—the ones that actually get used on a regular basis.

Migaku's Korean Academy course teaches you the specific ~1,500 words you need to follow 80% of Netflix plus ~200 common grammar points to string those words together.

That's solid as is, but a few things bring this course to the next level:

At 10 flashcards per day, it'll take you about 5 months to build the foundation you need to start exploring Netflix.

Step 3: Watch 10 minutes of comprehensible input per day

Comprehensible input is a special type of content aimed at beginners in which the host speaks only Korean but (a) intentionally uses simple phrasing and (b) uses simple words to talk around any difficult words they may use. Below is an example, and here are a bunch of comprehensible-input channels you can check out.

Migaku gives you a leg up by enabling you to click on words to see what they mean. If you stumble into a useful word or phrase—such as got it—you can click the orange button in the top-right corner of the dictionary to make a flashcard out of it.

Your flashcards include your selected word, the sentence they appear in and its audio, a screenshot of your video, plus a handful of other things you can choose. In this way, you can create your own learning materials with the press of a button.

(As an aside, you can watch any YouTube video via Migaku on your phone to enjoy the same functionalities shown above.)

The most important thing you need to remember if you want to learn Korean...

At this point, you should find that you've reached a pretty independent level of Korean! You're not perfect yet, but you are able to roughly follow media you enjoy—so long as you're able to look the occasional word up.

For the foreseeable future, all you need to do to continue improving in Korean is to interact with it. To translate that statement into a mic drop: