First, kudos to master Steve's series of Youtube videos on My 7 Language Learning Goals, and they lay one of the essential basic frameworks for learning any language in general.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1DGLnddKcI&list=PLiFB-yYuG2hiNmzz8GpdGmmyRDl5YzC6p

I want to address some hurdles a typical Korean learner may face in the learning process and some crucial things, such as milestones or a detailed roadmap worth mentioning and dealing with in specific approaches according to each user at Lingq. Hopefully, they will answer some of the questions, especially those mentioned by ConsistencyIsTheKey and Florian as bamboozled at the beginner's level.

These are my opinions based on my personal experience with the language. They may get more comprehensive and conclusive combined with insights from other experienced users, which I recommend sharing for the benefit of all.

Following is my roadmap according to the progression of difficulties with some of my comments.

Key elements

Hangul

Hangul functions effectively as a writing system. Romanization is only suitable for learning Hangul, but not so helpful in reading the Korean text in the long run. Learning Romanization for Hangul is comparable to acquiring Pinyin for Chinese characters with the same effort and learning Hangul to a few hundred Chinese characters as a beginner. However, we must realize a significant shortcoming of Romanization in representing Hangul phonetically in Korean compared with Pinyin for Chinese characters.

I have been practicing the Hangul alphabet chart with mnemonic hints from Miss Vicky's Youtube video on pen and paper. In addition, I have reinforced my learning by watching or listening to more pronunciation and introductory conversation lessons in the language, and I have ignored Romanization accompanied by text. It took me a month to learn all the basics and three months to become comfortable with the writing. More work is needed through further exposure to the language to have a greater mastery of Hangul.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85qJXvyFrIc&list=PLECz2rpRD3Z0W9QQzvPb3KtVYm1gtphv_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb5lUgpKwQg

Vocabulary and comprehension

Vocabulary acquisition has been slowest initially, especially before acquiring the first thousand words in the language and a good mastery of Hangul. I have encountered incomprehensible sentences occasionally and relied on the translation to gain a better understanding. I usually don't deliberately translate the sentence with the lookup of new words from the sentence.

Grammar

I have learned and absorbed most basic grammar from structured courses like Professor Yoon's videos for Integrated Korean and the Korean language course by the Cyber University of Korea. Both are available on Youtube, and I have imported the text into Lingq from Integrated Korean I found online. In addition, I have been using the following resources as well.

https://www.lingq.com/en/learn/ko/web/reader/2028460

https://www.youtube.com/c/ProfYoonsKoreanLanguageClass/playlists

https://kleartextbook.com/category/b_beginning/lesson-ppt/

https://talktomeinkorean.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@StudyAbroadinKorea/playlists

Chinese characters (Hanja)

We have discussed a great deal about the topic. We can rely on Chatgpt in addition to the content related to Chinese characters and sentence mining in a dictionary, provided the accuracy is ensured. Does anyone else have luck with the following inquiry?

1. List 10 Korean words with 면 as a common stem related to noodles but not a noodle itself.
2. Create a short story in Korean using these words.

A different variation of the first inquiry may return a different result. Some definitions need to be more accurate and related to noodles.

Contents

I+1 contents are a good choice, and I usually focus on one or two courses or resources for an extended time. I have acquired most vocabulary by reading and learning more by focusing on different aspects upon multiple passes on the same content, such as listening skills, grammar rules, set phrases, etc. I expect to avoid repeating the same content after finishing the first TV series and the first book in the language.

Methods and concepts

One of the key ideas is the learning readiness of learners, specifically the ability to process the text comfortably from the learners for maximum efficiency at the corresponding language level. Of course, the first thing to do is discover the meaning of symbols by learning Hangul to the heart. I have subsequently consumed content with linear difficulty, along with my progressing comprehension of the language.

Roadmap

I was learning from scratch with various online resources imported into Lingq. Some of the practice has proven extremely helpful.

1st month

Goal: Get familiar with the language by learning Hangul through mnemonic hints for Romanization.

Jenny's Korean

Integrated Korean: Beginning 1

Talktomeinkorean's essential courses

First 1k words (Milestone and toughest IMO)

2nd month

I had been practicing typing by entering words from some courses into Lingq to enhance my mastery of Hangul. I highly recommend it!

Typing practice: Jenny's Korean + samples sentences from Seemile Korean App

Integrated Korean: Beginning 2

Talktomeinkorean's essential courses (up to level 4)

https://www.lingq.com/en/learn/ko/web/reader/6320929

3rd month

Review less familiar content from 2nd month.

https://www.lingq.com/en/learn/ko/web/reader/2028460 (a breakthrough)

Integrated Korean: Intermediate 1

4th month

Integrated Korean: Intermediate 2

Quick Korean, Cyber University levels 2 and 3

Iyagi: Intermediate ⎟ Talk to Me in Korean

Review Lingq Mini Story for grammar, although I had never used it before.

A systematic grammar review with youtube channels

5th month

Quick Korean, Cyber University levels 4

Iyagi: Intermediate ⎟ Talk to Me in Korean

6th month

Consolidate my learning.

My learning in Korean has slacked off recently because I want to focus on reading English books. Anyways, the following is my want-to-learn list for further exploration in Korean.

Jadoo

Watching the Korean series Little women on Netflix will be interesting after reading the same title but a different novel by Louisa May Alcott and Pride and Prejudice.

외국인을 위한 한국어 읽기 (Korean Reading for Foreigners) at Lingq

These are my undertaking in learning Korean; others may have quite a different route from what I have experienced. Nevertheless, we should espouse the idea of self-improvement with visible progress after our little steps, albeit at a minimum. We will find the most suitable way comparable to the holy grail to prosper in the language and live the language to our original dream.

Please don't hesitate to share some of your valuable experiences, especially those at the beginner's level. They could be the paths a new learner searches for when trudging in a muddy quandary.

Interestingly, Alexander Argüelles & Jong-Rok Kim, have the following to say about the use of Romanization in Korean:

If this practice is indeed so harmful, maybe LingQ should spend its valuable engineering resources on facilitating the acquisition of the Korean alphabet instead? Would be good to have @Constantine weigh in on this.

At the risk of this being a controversial topic, what about North Korean? Would it be sensible to add way to differentiate courses or lessons by tags, similar to the way LingQ distinguishes between Spanish or Portuguese variants?

While I certainly don't have plans to learn Korean, I happen to have two textbooks teaching Korean, one [1] is explicitly teaching the North Korean variant and the authors of the other [2] have the following to say on the topic:

[1] Lehrbuch der modernen koreanischen Sprache, 1994, Wilfried Herrmann, Buske Verlag

[2] A Historical Literary and Cultural Approach to the Koran Language, 2001, Alexander Argüelles & Jong-Rok Kim, Hollym International Corp.

@ llearner

• ➡︎ Chinese characters as reference tools are perfect for learning modern Korean with a phonetic Hangul-based writing system.

And such a cool way to study etymology — at least for Sino-Korean words.

P.S. This thread has gotten so long that I'm reply-posting at the top. This forum becomes impossible when there are multiple replies on top of replies.

Hi, I’m intermediate 2  in Korean, I m fluent in several languages, this app ( the best from what I‘ve tried so far and the more intuitive) helps keeping my brain less bored, learn much faster and acquire new ones. learning languages is my hobby, addictive :)

as for Korean sometimes the translation doesn’t seem appropriate to the context at least. I would like to see short explanation of the suffixes used especially those that nuance the meaning. thanks 

I am Intermediate II and I am close to advanced

I’m a Beginner II, close to Intermediate I, according to LingQ.

When I started in October 2020, I actually did learn Hangul first with the help of Youtube and Anki. Of course it would be nice if one could use LingQ from the start without relying on external resources but that seems hard to realize.

I first thought it would be a good idea if you could add one of the Hangul-teaching-videos from YouTube as regular Beginners’ content, like, a collaboration with Miss Vicky or Kagoshima Jun or whoever is out there creating content for complete beginners. The problem is that the explanation will always be in English or Japanese or whatever mother tongue the creator of the content uses. So, it won’t be universal.

For me, Hangul was not the problem with Korean but the many homonyms. The translations are mostly wrong. For example I just came across the word 밀면. When I click on the "Popular Meanings", they mostly say "push, shove". Some add the meaning of "+ 면 = if", so it becomes: "if you push". But, from the context, it is clear that in this case the meaning is "wheat noodles", the 면 being 麺. At least some of the English "Popular Meanings" take this into account but in the Japanese or German "Popular Meanings", wheat noodles don’t appear at all.

Instead of a romanization, I would love to have the option to have little Hanja displayed above the words, that would so help to distinguish noun meanings from each other and from verbs, adjectives etc. I could imagine that a lot of learners from Japan and China would love that feature, too.

The good thing about Lingq – the user created content – also is its one Achilles' heel: If, for example, the Hanja were created automatically, how could the system distinguish between "if you push" and "wheat noodles" without someone professional editing it? Maybe that would be a chance to put the lately improving artificial intelligence to a test.

That said, what is going on my nerves is the constant correcting and editing that I’m inclined to do. I’m constantly in the sentence editing mode to erase incorrect word spacing that obscures the correct meaning of a sentence even more. I know I’m not forced to do this and I also see it as a way of improving my own language skills, but it’s almost impossible to edit sentences or translations on the mobile phone. There is a bug where sometimes the cursor jumps to the end of the sentence, so for every single character that I want to type I have to go back to the respective position in the sentence – impossible, really.

Also, I’m flipping between English, German and Japanese translations. (This concerns "Popular Meanings", dictionaries and translations.) I don’t know how LingQ decides which language they show me first but I noticed it changes all the time. One session I get the German translations first, the next one the English ones. The more I see the more I feel pressured to correct all of them!

I’m also volunteering a lot adding time stamps, since I hate to have the automated text-to-speech when there‘s the original audio available. I just wish the transcript (in my case TTMIK's Iyagi course) had less full stops in the middle of a sentence, since every full stop creates a new paragraph which causes the natural flow of the audio to be completely chopped up. In those cases I wished I could just delete whole paragraphs and add them to the sentence they belong to. But that might only be possible for the creator of the content?

Doing all this takes so much time that I sometimes wonder if it really helps my Korean or if I’m just procrastinating or if I maybe should get some money for my work? (Only joking…)

There’s a lot more to say about editing and bugs and differences between the desktop and the mobile version of LingQ but since it doesn’t concern Korean specifically, I’ll better stop here.

Despite all the nagging, I really love LingQ. The TTMIK Iyagi course that I’m into right now is perfect for me. I tried to add some own content, like K-drama-transript using a workaround but I’ve only done that once so far.

I'm enjoying learning Korean on LingQ at the intermediate level. I find the user experience and functionality to be very good and don't see the need for any significant changes. Based on my experience learning Korean, I would say that introducing transliteration to the Korean program on LingQ isn't really necessary. The Korean script - Hangeul - is quite easy to learn as it is highly phonetic without many exceptions to its basic rules of phonics. So, total beginners would do well to learn to pronounce Hangeul by sight first, before learning any of the language because learning transliterated Korean won't help you in a real communication situation. Transliteration is rarely used in Korea apart from place names on road signs. So, it's really only a crutch used by non-Korean speakers. Transliteration of Korean also must follow the official rules of Korean transliteration, which can change from time to time. So, I would say it is much more efficient to learn Korean through Hangeul from the beginning. I hope this is helpful.

I agree with everyone on this thread commenting about how we'd like to see improvements in translations/definitions. Whatever time I have available to donate to 'librarian' tasks is almost entirely spent on cleaning up translations/definitions. And there are many others who are doing the same even though they're not librarians. I often find that a definition I chose earlier because it was 'good enough' now has among the word's choices many other, much better definitions/translations to choose from. 🧡 to all you Korean learners for that extra effort!

I’m a beginner. I can read fairly fast, but don’t know much vocabulary or grammar constructions. There are multiple courses to choose from, but as a beginner who knows some particles (like 는/은, 를/을, 이/가, 에/에서, 도) and some basic vocabulary, lessons provided by LingQ can be difficult. That’s why I sometimes feel discouraged to use the platform until I know more Korean.

I'm going to comment and then look at what others have to say. Basically, all the conjugations and the way LingQ counts words. I have to look the same word up over and over and over and often create my own definitions using external resources (dictionaries). It drives me nuts. Of course, the better I get at the language the less I have to look up words or the better at it I get so it becomes less of an issue and over time I've seen the LingQ dictionary get better as users contribute to adding to the dictionary.

I can't relate to people who choose not to learn hangul on day 1. I would say maybe develop a course teaching hangul but otherwise I don't see the point. You could use IPA but why bother learning IPA when you can just learn hangul directly instead. And using romanization has the same problem - you have to learn how to read the romanization anyway so why not just learn hangul?

Keep in mind if you struggle to read a word you can just click/tap it and LingQ will pronounce it for you. So why would you want to us any script except hangul?

I self judge my Korean at A2 but I've at least looked at grammar books with intermediate grammar structures but many of them are still shaky or I don't know them at all. I'd say I know about 1500 words as counted by a dictionary (rough guess). LingQ has my word count at 18,834.

For me LingQ generally works quite well for Korean, at least since I got past the initial beginner stage. For the first steps in Korean and other languages which are quite different from the ones I already know, LingQ does not seem to be the best resource anyhow in my opinion. I tend to look for other resources first and then start to use LingQ more regularly.

My biggest challange for Korean in LingQ is currently to figure out the meanings of (some of) the endings. Available translations often only provide the meaning of the verb stem, but not always the complete meaning of the endings. Some useres have already provided very helpful translation and I guess this issue could greatly improve over time with more experienced users adding such explanations.

[Note: I am aware that grammar books also help with this, however it takes time to work through those.]

Korean romanization does more harm than good in my opinion.

My level: Beginner 2 with 4830 known LingQs as per today.

I have been learning Korean since last September on my second attempt. I rate myself an A2 in reading and listening in Korean. The first one I made three years ago and failed, in which I learned up to 300ish words and gave it up. However, I attribute the difficulty of learning to a different writing system in Korean and a need for more solid motivation at the time. Nonetheless, as a beginner, transliteration is a distraction that interferes with the more natural acquisition of Hangul compared to simply listening and matching the pronunciation to the actual words in Korean IMP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb5lUgpKwQg?t=01m55s

@Hagowingchun

Studying the word list with the shared word stems by the Chinese characters could be tiresome. The purpose of Chinese characters included at Krdict is for the learner to distinguish the different meanings of a particular word or words. These Chinese characters could have been represented by symbols or in another language, Pinyin, binary codes, etc.

Learning Chinese characters may only be necessary after the intermediate level, even though it's more intuitive if someone has good knowledge beforehand. 동학 is a classmate in English. Most nouns in Korean have a secondary literal meaning besides simple translation, which applies to verbs as well since we can make some nouns in Korean into verb forms.

One of the literal meanings of 동 is "same"; I would be more inclined to associate it with con in contemporary or co in a coworker or colleague. Now, 동창 (attending or studying, a traditional way and still in use) under the same window as a classmate, 동학 studies together for a classmate, and 동료 officially holds a position at the same time for coworkers or colleagues is more understandable with knowing the literal and comparable meaning in English. We can deduce meanings for 동기 동+기(period) and 동시 동+시(time) with fair easiness.

We must remember that one of the literal meanings for 동 is associated with the definition above. We use it to at least notice the same component in the new words with the shared stem, and a direct association between the actual Korean expression and the literal meaning is better than with 同, tong, or con, co, or 1001 if someone does not have a good knowledge of that representation.

By the way, 원 means a member from another post you quoted aligns with the ending like -er, ee, an, ist, etc. Another way is to associate 원 with the stem "essence," as in quintessence for a secondary meaning, as opposed to the given definition of a prefix used to mean original or raw. 원주민 aborigine, 원래 origin, and 원칙 rule; principle are a few examples related to this one.

It will be keen to discover the similarities of shared stems between Korean words and yet to distinguish differences when the circumstance does not apply.

이번에 한국에 와서 우리 영국 고딩들이 할 수 있는 여러 체험 중에 한국 학생으로서의 하루를 꼭 경험하게 해주고 싶었어요.

체험 and 경험 are similar but a little bit different in their usage.

카이는 만두는 만들어도 바느질은 못해요.

만 in 만두는 and 만들어도 share nothing in meaning. 만 has other meanings which can be used as a stem but not in the context from above.

I recommend implementing a function allowing Librarians to denote general stems in the context. It will be a great addition to have a recording of the learner's speech compared with the audio in sentence mode.

Now this video I did watch just because it's so charming. We all have to start somewhere!

I can't read the letters, so I'm missing latin sliblings for spelling. In Japanese they have it. So it's easier to learn Japanese as Korean.

I just wanted to comment on the transliteration. If we are talking about the english letters next to the korean.

The korean alphabet is easy to learn but the major problem with transliteration versus say japanese kana is there are so many sound changes rules for example ㅂ ㅁ ㄴ ㅈ ㄷ ㄹ have different sounds depending on the place in the word.

ㄹ can make an L sound if there are two touching like 골라 = go+ la

it can make a tap/soft d noise like the american pronunciation of wa(t)er like in 때리다 = de +dee +da when it touches vowels or is in the middle of words.

or at the beginning of words it makes a softer than english but distinct l noise like 라면 = la + myun this is ramen but with in l sound at the beginning.

this is just the ㄹ block so a computer will not transcribe these noises correctly like the example below also with the doubles and stressed consonants ㅃㅉㄸㄲㅆ and ㅋㅌㅊㅍ transliteration it just ignores these. If korean didn't have these letters and sounds it would still use characters (think japanese) because of lack of sounds/combinations etc.

transliteration puts ㅂ ㅍ ㅃ pretty much as the same noise either p or b but just cause a level 0 person doesn't know the difference doesn't mean it is not important. The korean vowels are also tricky like 아 어 오 우 으 some people cant hear the difference between combinations of these but in order to hear anything one needs to learn these.

한국은 네 계절이 뚜렷하다.

Hangugeun ne gyejeori tturyeotada. (the tranliteration)

it should be hangoogun neh Gay-jul-dee Doo-dyu-saa-da

the difference between these if they arent that big of a deal then there is an argument for having it, but korean without hangul is like if chinese ignored tones or characters etc just because they are "harder" does not mean they should be ignored.

The only critique for lingq of korean is the sheer amount of word forms in the other post we talk about how reaching 200k+ known words in korean is very common for people who become fluent in the language. This is not the case with other languages but I don't know if there is a solution for this. Korean is just a hard language its backwards still basically uses characters for vocab (stupid amounts of compound words), and has more grammar forms than japanese by a long shot.

it is hard to acquaint my korean level I have studied hanja extensively and probably know a few thousand words (its hard to quantify this because of the compound like nature of the vocab) I would say I have a low a2/high a1 level with extreme vocab potential (1400 hanja). I have also spent a lot of studying what makes korean hard as it doesn't use characters but is still considered a category five language by FSI etc. People with higher korean levels will be more adamant than me for hangul because it is the life blood of korean and it takes a week. Hangul is absolutely necessary by the way haha aka transliteration can be added for people that want to learn it like that but please make it be able to be toggled off completely.

Hey Костя,

adding a transliteration is a great idea. I know that experienced Korean learners look down on this and feel it is superfluous. But to me it would be the difference between learning Korean using LingQ or doing it elsewhere. I would probably just get a textbook to get started or look for other learning resources online. I did play around with Korean on LingQ, but not knowing the script made the process so annoying that I quickly deleted the language again :) I might try again in the future though.

LingQ's official introduction to the Korean writing system was not particularly elucidating: https://www.lingq.com/en/grammar-resource/korean/alphabet/

I would've preferred a more traditional introduction, comprising e.g. consonants: initial, final, aspirated or tense; vowels; and an explanation on how syllable blocks are constructed; and maybe even some exercises. But what is most sorely missing is audio, especially since the transliterations are said to be somewhat inaccurate. It is just really difficult to learn a writing system in isolation to the sound system. So, even after perusing the official introduction I find myself completely unable to even approach "LingQ 101 -Getting Started" - I can't read a single word. It is of course possible I missed something or just didn't do it right. But learning Korean on LingQ seems unusually challenging, even more so than Chinese or Japanese which already feature romanization. (I don't know in how far this problem affects Arabic, Persian Gujarati etc.).

My level in Korean is zero (0), I know nothing.