Any tips on learning Hangul? I’m using Memrise right now but it seems like starting with LingQ is super difficult if you’re not familiar with the writing system…From people that started a language from scratch using LingQ, do you have any advice?
I first started deciphering Hangul just by using a character chart from the Wikipedia article on Hangul, which I found very practical and it ended up being my way of thinking about it during my beginning phase with Korean.
You can learn Korean writing fairly quickly, with a pen and paper, and a study guide, which there are a bunch of, available on the internet. Another good resource is the Living Language Complete Korean self-study course, which comes with a very good booklet dedicated to teaching Hangul.
Almost any intro Korean textbook will start with an explanation of Hangul. You can also find a lot of free pdfs online – which is what I used initially. Just google “Learn Hangul”. It’s incredibly quick to pick up the basics.
After you learn the basic sounds, I’d suggest checking out the Fluent Forever Pronunciation Trainer for Korean (which is basically a couple YouTube videos and an Anki deck). Korean has some complicated sound change rules which make a word sound very different from what you expect. After a few weeks using the pronunciation trainer, I found that I was much better at being able to guess at the proper pronunciation of a written word, and guess the correct spelling of a spoken word. It definitely improved my reading and listening skills.