How to use the Korean course

Glossika makes it easy for everybody to learn Korean without having to learn the writing system, although I must admit that if you've learned 한글 already, I know you're a probably a hard-core fan!

If you want to read and write Korean, at the bottom of your session screen, turn on Full Practice mode. There is a Typing Guide below the typing box (it's not a pronunciation guide -- it's simply to show you the proper spelling of Korean words).

If you want to practice speaking and listening, then turn on Listening Mode, and I strongly recommending turning on the "Recording" button as well! You'll get to see more detailed phonics in this mode for pronouncing Korean properly.

Korean is romanized and taught here using one of the popular romanizations. Please keep in mind that Korean is written with spaces, unlike Chinese and Japanese.

Glossika offers transcriptions for all languages written in different scripts:

● Typing Guide (appears under the typing box): this adheres closely to actual spelling rules, and teaches you how to type in native scripts. For Korean, we teach you how to type using one or two roman letters per Korean letter, as closely to the Korean spelling as possible. Korean has a lot of sound changes when spoken correctly, so do not rely on the typing guide as a pronunciation guide! Feel free to turn on your Korean keyboard when you're confident enough, and start typing in Korean anytime you want. Our romanized typing for Korean is a "fuzzy match" algorithm, which means that many letters have multiple romanized spellings that will be accepted. Don't be afraid to type in the "wrong" romanization different from what's shown on the screen, and don't be afraid to voice or devoice some consonants (b = p and r = l), because we know that the romanization is just a rough guide.

● Pronunciation Guide (toggle on and off in listening and recording modes): the pronunciation guide is an easier to read version how to pronounce each word accurately. For you linguists out there, this pronunciation guide is a "phonetic" romanization and DOES show allophones. This is actually different than most of our Glossika courses, but simply because it's a really bad idea to show a phonemic spelling for Korean. And you already get the phonemic spelling in the Typing Guide. What this means is almost all the consonants in Korean change in their environment next to other consonants. It's really important to internalize all these sound changes and produce them correctly if you want to be even remotely understood by Koreans.

● Phonics Guide (toggle on and off in listening and recording modes): phonics is written in international phonetic alphabet (IPA), and for you linguists, Glossika IPA is always a "phonetic" spelling showing the allophones. Basically our Korean IPA is the same as the pronunciation guide, but written in IPA symbols.

Korean is not tonal at all, so we do not show any tonal or intonational details in our transcriptions.

We post regular updates in notifications here on updates to Korean.

How to use the Korean course

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