How long does it take to learn Korean? Is Korean easy to learn?

So, you want to learn the Korean language? You're a K-pop Stan, or maybe you've fallen in love with Korean dramas, and now you're wondering how long it takes to learn Korean.

I hear you.

In this blog post, we're going to talk about:

How long does it take to learn Korean?

This question is really hard to answer. It's kind of like asking how long a string is. You can't answer it. You can measure how long a specific string is, but you can't say how long a string is in general. There are a bunch of different strings!

According to the US government: ~6,000+ hours

There's no easy way to say this, so I'm just going to rip the band-aid right off.

According to the US Government, Korean is classified as a "super-hard" language that takes diplomats 2,200 hours to learn.

If your jaw dropped, it gets worse:

Why data can be incredibly misleading

Before you close the page out of hopelessness—please look at this:

What you're seeing is me reading Sweet Home, the famous Korean webtoon that recently got turned into a hit Netflix series. I'm reading it in Korean, and I have not spent anywhere near 6,000 hours learning Korean.

If you look up in the top-right corner there, you'll see that I know about 900 Korean words.

And this brings me to a super important point:

If you want to get fluent in Korean, then yeah. That's going to take a long time. Hundreds—or, more likely, thousands—of hours. The thing is, you don't need to be fluent in Korean to begin doing cool things in it. I've probably spent less than 100 hours learning Korean and I'm already reading webtoons, which has been my goal this whole time.

It'll take a long time to reach fluency in Korean, but what the data doesn't show you is that the vast majority of these hours are spent having fun, interacting with Korean content.

Anyway:

Case studies: Two people who Korean fast

I nearly had an aneurism when I saw that the FSI said it takes 6,000 hours to learn Korean, so I turned to Reddit. Within a few minutes of searching, I found this:

The first person says this:

The second person says this:

Now, I'm not saying it's easy by any means. These people both put 5–8 hours per day into Korean for an extended period of time. Not everybody can do that.

All I'm trying to say is that if you love Korean—K-pop, K-dramas, maybe Korean literature—that gives you a huge advantage. There are things you want to do in Korean. That's super important. In fact, when it comes to language learning, it's basically everything. We'll talk about why in the "nobody cares" section down below.

How language learning works, and what it what it takes to reach fluency in Korean

Having spent a bit too much time on Reddit and Discord, I see a lot of people saying things like this:

Like, no, man. Don't do that.

Ask any polyglot you want and I'm pretty sure you'll get the same answer: the hardest language to learn is your first one. This is because learning Korean is about so much more than just Korean:

Anyway, I digress.

Yes. If you're reading this blog post, you should learn Korean.

What makes Korean hard to learn?

The issue isn't necessarily that Korean is hard so much as that English and Korean are different. Very different, and different in a lot of ways. As such, if you're learning Korean, you'll have to grapple with challenges like the fact that:

It's in a totally different language family

Korean is very different than English. This is important. A language like Spanish, for example, gives native English speakers a bunch of freebies:

All this goes to say that Spanish isn't really a super foreign language—there's a lot about it that's really quite familiar.

...But when a native speaker of English decides they want to speak Korean, that's a different story. Pretty much nothing transfers. Korean vocabulary is different, Korean idioms are different... Korean is a completely new language. This means that there are many things you will need to learn, whereas a learner of a language like Spanish or French can simply intuit.

Its sentences are structured differently than English's

We go into this in more detail in our post on basic Korean grammar, but if you want to learn the language, you're going to need to wrap your head around some very new linguistic concepts:

A lot of this things in the Korean language won't feel very intuitive, so the only way to learn it is to spend a lot of time interacting with it. You're really learning a new language, and to do that you're going to need to get comfortable organizing your ideas in new ways.

Korean culture is very different than ours

Korea places strong emphasis on social hierarchy and respect, and this is deeply embedded in the language via a quite complex system of what are called honorifics. Basically, Korean requires speakers to use different vocabulary and grammar depending on the social status and age of the person they are talking to, plus how familiar they are with each other. Even everyday conversations require careful consideration of these social dynamics, as using the wrong level of speech can be considered highly disrespectful.

Part of learning Korean is learning the culture. You'll often find that, in theory, you have the grammar you need to express an idea... but you won't know how Korean speakers would express that idea. The result is that you can produce sentences that are perfectly correct, but still not natural.

Korean pronunciation is pretty challenging

Let's start with a big breath of relief: Korean is not a tonal language. However, as we discuss in our in our post on how to learn Hangul, the Korean alphabet, that isn't to say that Korean pronunciation is easy, by any means.

The infamous example is that many Korean consonants come in threes. They sound the same to man speakers of English, but they aren't: they actually differentiate some words in Korean.

Korean vowels aren't a walk in the park, either. Here's two to start with:

So, yeah. Learning any foreign language will require you to learn at least a few new sounds, but Korean has some doozies.

...That's intense; what about Korean is easy to learn?

Just so you know, I have an agenda. I want you to start learning Korean.

We just covered some kinda scary stuff, so let's balance it out a bit:

The Korean writing system makes it easy to learn to read Korean words

I won't go into a ton of detail here because we have a whole blog post about this, but you should know that the Korean writing system was literally designed to be logical and easy to learn.

You see, for a long time, Korea didn't have an alphabet of its own. Government officials and such used Chinese characters to write Korean, but nobody really liked that: they took a long time to learn and did a frankly terrible job of reflecting the sounds that existed within Korean.

Then, back in the 1400's, King Sejong came out and was like: "Alright, here's the deal. Chinese characters suck. We're going to shrink the 3,000+ characters down to less than 30 Korean letters. There's going to be no more funny business with needing 15 strokes to write one character, and words are going to look the way they sound. That is all."

He didn't actually say that, but it's basically what he ended up doing. The Korean language is hard to learn for a lot of reasons, but its writing system is not one of them.

(You don't need to get fluent in Korean to seriously level up your Korean karaoke skills is all I'm saying.)

Korean grammar is pretty regular / predictable

If your native language is English, you've been getting the short end of the grammar and vocabulary stick for your entire life. So many English words have unpredictable past tense forms and participle forms (have ~ed). You can't really logic your way through English: you just have to memorize a lot of stuff.

Here, Korean is different from English in a good way.

While Korean has more verb forms than English, Korean verbs are very regular. Once you learn the basic pattern used for a tense, you can apply that pattern to pretty much any verb you want.

This could describe a lot of Korean grammar, really: a lot of it will be new and require some thinking to figure out initially, but once you've got it, you've got it.

Awesome Korean media and resources help you learn the language

If you're reading this post, you're probably aware of how awesome Korean media is. Whether your thing is K-pop, Korean TV shows on Netflix, or award-winning literature, there's no shortage of interesting Korean content to consume. This gives you a massive advantage in the intermediate stage, where you'll be learning primarily by directly interacting with the language.

And it's not just intermediate learners that benefit from this.

Check this out:

Learn Korean in Korean is an awesome YouTube channel that teaches you Korean... in Korean... without using any English. Accomplishing this takes a lot of creativity and experience as a teacher. (And a bunch more stuff like this here.)

Suffice it to say that there are some incredible Korean resources out there that people have obviously put a lot of love into.

Nobody cares, just tell me how I can learn Korean faster

I'm going to make a blanket statement here:

You don't need to spend a lot of money on Korean language courses. You don't need to move to Korea. You don't need to do "this one weird trick" that will help you learn Korean fast. All you have to do is spend time with Korean.

Migaku is a language learning app made by language learners, and we teach Korean like this:

First, you learn to read and pronounce Hangul:

And then you move onto our Korean Academy course:

This course teaches you ~300 grammar points and the ~1,200 most common Korean vocabulary words. It's a flashcard-based course, so you can do it anywhere, and by the time you finish, you'll recognize 80% of the words you see in Korean media. (We did the math.)

From this point, you'll move on to the real strength of Migaku:

We make Korean text in places like subtitles and X (formerly Twitter) interactive—you can simply click on new Korean words to see what they mean. If the word looks useful, you can click another button to turn it into a flashcard. We'll periodically ask you to review these flashcards, ensuring that you eventually remember the words they contain.

As a result, with Migaku, if you're interested in learning Korean, it's not super hard. I'd almost say that it's pretty easy. Simply consume the content you're interested in, we'll turn them into learning opportunities, and you'll work toward Korean fluency largely as a byproduct of consuming content you find interesting.

( P.S. — Migaku is totally free for 10 days, which is enough time to finish our Hangul course and learn how to pronounce Korean words. )

Basically: Go study Korean, just don't expect to learn Korean in a year or something like that

Korean is a challenging language to learn for native English speakers, but it's not impossible. You (probably) aren't going to become fluent in Korean in a year, but if you start now and put in consistent effort, you'll likely become able to do some cool things in Korean within a year.

If you're ready to take the plunge, here's a step-by-step guide to building your foundation and reaching the intermediate level.

Good luck!