Online Resources for Learning Korean

I promised YouTuber Felix (username loki2504) a video on some of the resources I use to study Korean, but I decided to make a blog entry first. In this entry I will talk about some of the websites that I find useful. I also use textbooks to study, but I will talk about those in another entry.

Useful Websites for Studying Korean

There are many websites that are very useful for beginner-level students of Korean. The websites in this blog post are those that I tend to use often whenever I have time to study Korean.

1) http://www.learnkorean.com/

This is the website that I used to familiarize myself with the Korean language. There are lessons on this website to learn basic Korean vocabulary, grammar and Hanja (Chinese Characters).

2) http://ezcorean.com/

This website has a vocabulary list consisting of 6000 commonly used Korean words. The words are categorized into beginner, intermediate and advanced, and are further subdivided into nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs. Once in a while a make vocabulary lists which I arrange according to what part of speech they belong to as I find the words are easier to remember when arranged in that way. Furthermore most of the words have example sentences so you can see how to words are used.

3) http://korean.sogang.ac.kr/

This website was introduced to me by another YouTube user named Cody. It is like an online textbook, which contains exercises for reading, listening and writing. There are lessons for beginner and intermediate learners of Korean. I believe there are also other universities with similar online programs but I have not yet checked them out.

4) http://www.koreanclass101.com/

This was the very first podcast for Korean learners. Podcasts such as these are good way to get used to the natural rhythm of Korean native speakers. While the speakers in the podcasts speak much more slowly than they do in real life, their rhythm and intonation is much more natural, unlike those found in other online lessons or textbooks. I especially like the Audio Blog feature.

5) http://www.talktomeinkorean.com/

This is a relatively new podcast that boasts a lot of free material such as video lessons on YouTube and workbooks in PDF format. I like their interactive video stories on YouTube. However my favorite from this website is their "iyagi" series which is aimed at intermediate speakers. I think my vocabulary level is at intermediate, but my listening skills are still at upper beginner at best. Therefore "iyagi" is perfect for me. I will try translating the "iyagi" series into English.

6) http://dic.naver.com/

This online dictionary very useful because you can search the Korean equivalents of words in English, Chinese, Japanese and vice-versa.

7) http://www.zonmal.com/

This dictionary is useful for finding the definition and pronunciation of Hanja. This is especially useful for me because I like learning Hanja-based vocabulary, which are usually loanwords from Japanese.

8) http://learnkorean.ning.com/

This is an online community where learners of Korean can communicate with each other. I sometimes post the odd video or Korean blog post here for practice. If you are going to Korea and if you want to meet up with some other Korean learners, this website is very useful for contacting them.

I’m sure there are other useful Korean language-learning websites. I’ll post them here on my blog when I find them. Good luck with your Korean studies!

화이팅!

Daily Korean Verb and Adjective

Everyday I will post a Korean verb and adjective with examples from the online Naver dictionary, and translate the examples into English and Japanese (and into Chinese if I can). I will do this so I can gradually build up my base of verbs and adjectives, which I currently lack. Hopefully, this will be helpful for other learners of Korean as well.