7 Reading Tips to Accelerate Your Korean Learning

There's a lot of fluff lists out there. "how to learn X language", "20 tips to become fluent in X" and 99% of the time they're all just generic advice that everyone already knew. Well this list aims to actually give you tips that you can actually use to make progress with Korean. There is no real order or priority to any of the tips but they will all benefit most people in some way.

As I have stated in previous posts, reading is simply the best way to make rapid progress in a language due to the amount of content you can cover and the large amount of vocabulary used. The tips will be useful for all levels including tips that beginners and advanced learners can use straight away. 

If you found these tips helpful or have tips of your own you would like to share, let me know in the comments below. It's great to get a lot of different perspectives so that we can help future learners achieve their goals. There will likely be a part 2 so please return for that at a later date.

Below I will leave a playlist of video versions of similar tips and more.

Tip #1: Starting Out

This one is mainly for beginners but I will try to cover some ways to find new content to read. If you do not read and have been mainly learning through school lessons or grammar books, then it might be a good idea to even use some of the beginner recommendations to get started.

When starting out learning a language it can be hard to find content to read that is at your level but also interesting to read. One of Korean's main problems is the lack of graded reader content for foreign learners. My main recommendation for beginners used to be Yonsei's Reading books, as going through volumes 1-3 would usually get you to a point where you can start to reading content made for natives, however you would likely still be lacking vocabulary.

The main problem with the Yonsei  Reading series is that, it is quite uninspired and generally quite boring to read. On top of that, it can be quite expensive to actually purchase the books, therefore opting to start with Olly Richards' Korean Stories book is a much more pleasant experience both for the reader and the reader's wallet. 

From here we can start to branch out and find content that is a little harder. Try to find content that is still within your level so that you can understand the general gist of what is happening. Personally I found this series of classic books (most are available on Ridiselect), which have been translated and simplified for school age children. However I know people who have read webtoons as they are generally a lot simpler due to them being mainly dialogue. 

If you are not a complete beginner then it would not be a bad idea to start by picking a genre that you wish to become familiar with and focus on that first. Through the many different book websites we can see the top rated books in each genre, this does not mean they will be easy but you can always view the preview before making any purchases.

Genres can include; news, fantasy, romance, economics, politics, self-help, Crime, Thriller and more. You will get the most gains from reading something you are interested in rather than something you are told to read to become better. However try not to read something too hard as you get less benefit than something that you can at least follow along with. You can even turn to google to find recommendations for various genres. 

Tip #2: Pre-Plan

Many people fall into the trap of just constantly acquiring resources. They have 100 books on the shelf, and have never opened them once. It's like when you have that steam library full of 200 games from humble bundle yet you still have nothing to play. It will make your life much easier to just pick one and focus on finishing it rather than looking for more and more to read.

This tip however is mainly focused on planning what you are going to read days before it's actually time to read it. First we want to choose what we are going to read in the following weeks and set finishing those as our goal. Once we know what we want to read we can reduce a lot of time that would have been spent choosing what to read. When we have a solid plan like this we don't need to think and we can just do.

Moving on we can start to set not just what we read but how much. I generally suggest setting a solid goal that you can hit, my preference is number of pages. I first started with reading 30 pages per day and now I read anywhere between 40-70 depending on the book's layout. First you want to find an amount that is comfortable for you to read daily, if you can hit X amount of pages in your allotted time then set that as your daily amount of pages.

Once you have a number of pages you can start planning how long it will take to finish and which page you will have to read up to in the next few days. This way we can always know where we need to go and it becomes a lot harder to miss days or become lazy. 

Below I will share my tracking sheet where you will be able to see how I plan which books I am going to read and also what page number I will end up on. This is just the way I do it but if you can develop your own system that works for you it will help you tremendously rather than whimsically choosing what to read on the spot each day.

Tip #3: Language Density

One of the biggest failures of people who have been learning for a long time and hit a "plateau" is generally down to their lack of reading in general, but those who do read will eventually come across this problem as they max out on their gains from webtoons, twitter posts and Vlive. There comes a time when one needs to look at the density of content one is consuming.

The most dense content will always be pure written books with pages and pages of content to read. Littered with descriptions and conversations, the story needs to be described with only words which makes for a much more difficult experience than one would find looking at pictures or reading short blogs.

Talking from experience, reading a book will allow you to cover vast amounts of content in the same time it would take you to read a webtoon, you will likely cover hours of webtoon reading just in 10 minutes of reading a book. I believe this is down to the lack of needing to look at pictures and the lack of needing to scroll constantly.

Some content that varies in density may be things like news articles and blog posts which depending on the genre or the poster can be quite dense or very short and littered with pictures. If you find yourself hitting a plateau of some kind or feeling like you aren't progressing much at all then trying to find content that is much more dense will likely be the answer.

The one disadvantage to having more density is that if you want to focus output and want to see very repetitive phrases and grammar points used over and over then it may be better for you to focus on a very conversational webtoon or YouTube video as reading dense books daily may give you a much broader knowledge but leave you lacking an extremely strong solidified daily use vocabulary.

I still believe however that covering more content will in the end yield more gains. It would be lovely to see an experiment of 2 learners, one of who is focused on reading conversational simpler content vs one who is reading very broadly on a range of topics and see how large the difference would be.

Tip #4: Take Breaks

This one may seem obvious at face value but it is the success to being able to complete your daily reading goal with very little worry in the mind. This may be the simplest tip in the entire blog post but I think it is definitely the most important one for keeping a healthy relationship with your reading.

Now personally I have been reading daily since April 2019 and haven't missed a single day. Reading my bare minimum pages is my main goal. Even if I do not get to interact in Korean in any other way I'm happy if I can get my reading done and the rest is just a bonus. 

A long time ago I stumbled upon something called the pomodoro technique, I won't link the site because it's become heavily monetised and I believe in free information for the masses. Essentially you do work for a specified amount of time with a max of 25 minutes then take a 5 minute break. You repeat this 4 times and on the 4th break you take a longer break of 10-15 minutes.

Personally I know when I need to take a break while I'm reading, which usually ends up being every 40 minutes to an hour. In my downtime which is usually 5-10 minutes, I'll usually listen to a couple songs or catch up on social media. Regularly taking breaks will reduce your fatigue meaning that you would be able to cover more content in the same amount of time. 

With this tip you need to find out what works for you but don't fall into the trap of being lazy and trying to tell yourself it's ok to take a break every 10 minutes or so. People seem to find it extremely hard to follow basic instructions because they tend to invent meaning for themselves. The advice is, take a break when you feel you are becoming fatigued from work, as to reset your brain by focusing on something else for a short while. 

This should help you get through your allotted time of reading much more smoothly because it will be broken into smaller chunks. There is also a similar technique where instead of taking a break you switch your focus onto another task which helps keep your brain attentive. I think this technique is great for those who need to achieve other tasks while learning a language at the same time. Sometimes I will go for a walk in between reading sessions which is great for resetting your brain while keeping the blood flowing.

Tip #5: Read a Long Series/Same Author

One of the great things about reading is getting caught up in the world and the characters. Well if you want this to last even longer then this tip is the one for you. Effectively it is what it sounds like. Reading long series such as webnovels, book series and even possibly including works from the same author has tonnes of benefits.

The first noticeable thing will be that you have more time to get used the characters and quirks of the world. I may use Harry Potter as the main examples for this one but imagine words like muggle will not be just a one off occurrence but a specific word set to describe something that exists within that world. 

If you managed to read the entirety of Harry Potter and still not understand the meaning of muggle then that would be impressive in it's own right but because it shows up regularly throughout the series, this gives you more chances to learn it. By sticking with a single universe, written by a single author we get much more repetition of these words.

Another advantage is that one person tends to use the same set of vocabulary and phrasing over and over. This gives us even more repetition of certain grammar points helping to really get them to sink in. There are so many words I have learnt in Korean just from them appearing so many times even in a short period. Sometimes it feels like I am learning a word that the author had recently learnt themselves because they start using it a bunch of times in quick succession.

For me it tends to be a more enjoyable experience. A good side effect is that you don't need to find something to read very often when your books are taking you 2-3 months to finish. This helps to tie in with tip #2 because we can spend less time looking for stuff to read. I've found from experience that a good length is anything that takes anywhere from 2-3 months. Anything that is longer than 3 months runs a high risk of becoming less enjoyable.

Tip #6: Warm Up

This is something that get criminally over looked in all aspects of life. You'll notice this in school that the students who walk to school tend to be more awake and ready to tackle the day. On top of this having a good breakfast can really make your day much better.

My main go to for waking myself up is to listen to a podcast after I get up. This gets some Korean in my brain before I've even had breakfast. This is great for just waking yourself up and getting your brain alert and ready to receive it's daily dose of pounding from the 한글 on the page.

More physical now, Going for a short walk or doing some exercise before starting reading gets the blood flowing. I always feel like I am reading much quicker and understanding more if I am physically warmed up. This makes complete sense considering the brain is getting increased blood flow and the increased breathing rate is getting more oxygen into your system.

Another active thing you can do is to get your prefrontal cortex activity up. We can do this by doing sums or reading aloud. This lets us warm up our brain in a similar fashion that we would warm up before exercise by doing light activity before lifting heavy weights. Reading aloud is great for warming up because you can do it while you're doing the reading. Doing this for long periods is not advised as you might use up too much energy and want to stop reading.

Tip #7: Read Some Background Information

This one is king for when you're early into reading, even better if you haven't read something before. I suppose you could tie this in with reading something you already know. This way you already know most of the context so you can focus more on understanding the sentences and making sure you're understanding the story correctly.

It's easy to think that you are understanding something in a foreign language, only to find out a few months later that you didn't at all. By reading some kind of summary, we can confirm that we are understanding the core content and be more judgemental about the parts we aren't understanding.

Knowing what is going to happen, as with reading a synopsis or having read it before allows us to know some of the random words that might only exist within that universe, say peoples names. One of the greatest things I found was I randomly googled 드래곤 라자(the series I'm currently reading) and I found a drawing someone made of the main characters which made it much easier to understand what they looked like making it a little easier to not get lost. 

I also found the characters full names on namu wiki, which definitely helped at the start as the characters are often be referred to in many different ways which can be confusing, especially because even when they introduce themselves as their full name it's easy to forget a few pages later.

Obviously you don't want to ruin the story for yourself, so before beginning it's good to read just a general synopsis like that which you would find on the blurb of a book. Then when you have finished try find a full summary, which can even be in English, as you're just using it to confirm that you understood the story.

Bonus Tip: Reading Native's Writing

I think as a non-native speaker it can be hard to get used to reading a foreign language as it is handwritten. In the UK we learn to "join" our letters from a fairly young age so everyone tends to have a very similar way of writing each letter in order for it to connect to the following one and in some cases they don't. 

Knowing the basics of how a native approaches each letter will help tremendously in learning how to read them too. In English the majority of people will write letters in the exact same fashion following something called stroke order.

This can vary from country to country even ones that use the same alphabet. Obviously there are only 2 countries that use 한글 as their main writing script. I don't know if North Korea uses a different stroke order to South Korea but what I do know is South Korean stroke order. This will help you distinguish many characters especially ones that do not look like the print form which often characters like ㅂㅁㅈㅊ will not.

This image below made by our mater Trevarr will show you the basics of stroke order. There are more variations of characters such as ㅁ, ㅂ, ㅎ and vowels but for the most part this covers the basics that you will need to read most handwriting. 

Now you just need to practice doing it, you may often see handwriting used as the font on various TV shows so it's beneficial for most learners to at least be able to read simple handwriting that isn't basic blocks.

For related posts please check out these pages:

• How to Start Reading in a Foreign Language
• Anki Decks for Korean Learners
• Nintendo Switch Games to play in Korean
• The Monolingual Transition and How to Approach it
• Smartphone Apps For Learning Korean
• How to Use Ridibooks(Korean Ebook Store)
• Olly Richards' Short Stories in Korean for Intermediate Learners Review
• Billy Go's Korean Reading Made Simple Review
• I read 61 Korean books in 2020
  
• 7 Fantasy Webtoons You Should Read in 2021
  
• Tuttle's Korean Stories for Language Learners Review
• The Best Vocabulary Books for Korean