한국어·韓國語

The Korean Language

By Alan W — Last updated October 07, 2021

I've created this website on the Korean language to offload everything I've learned about Korean (and learning Korean) so that you can quickly acquire whatever level of Korean you're aiming for, avoiding the running in circles and problems I've had to work through.

Study and Tooling

Here, I list resources useful for studying Korean.

Korean-specific learning tips

Visit my learning page for general advice.

Compared with the European languages, the terminology for describing the Korean language is not as well standardized. Therefore it is often not a straightforward thing to "translate" between different learning resources— different terms might be used for the same forms. I recommend familiarizing yourself first with one resource (e.g. if you're taking a class in-person, the textbook you're using) and then making sure to relate stuff you look up elsewhere to this resource. This way, you can have at least one stable reference.

I don't think you have to learn hanja 韓字 to speak Korean well. As someone who doesn't speak Korean well, I know you can do the opposite—know a lot of hanja without speaking well 😥

Dictionaries

  • Naver's Korean-English Dictionary—this excellent resource not only has "traditional" dictionary information, but also draws on rich text corpora of example sentences showing how vocabulary is used
  • Daum Dictionary—another useful dictionary which, like Naver's, supports other languages—especially Chinese and Japanese

Print Resources

In the past couple years, we've seen a big increase in the number of Korean learning resources available. Briefly, my recommendations are to acquire a phrasebook and a grammar. An introductory textbook could be helpful to get started, but a phrasebook is more useful for instant communication and a grammar is more useful for systematically laying out the grammar of Korean.

Unless you have special concerns (e.g. travelling to the Korean countryside without power), the online dictionaries listed here should more than suffice for lexical resources.

회이팅하세요!

Fighting!