Retro Learns Korean: Can You Learn Korean from Kpop?

If you're asking this question, then at least you may have some interest in learning Korean, which is a great start, or maybe you're just interesting in finding an answer to the question. Hopefully I will be able to answer both of these. If you're new to my blog or language learning, it may be worth reading through these three articles when you have finish this post:

There are a few glaringly obvious advantages and disadvantages to using Kpop and by extension music to learn a language. Advantages such as repetitive language, easy to listen repeatedly, enjoyable to listen to. Sadly a lot of these advantages are negated by any lack of effort to search the meaning of the words or effort to learn the language.

In my article 'The Role of Listening in Language Learning', I explain how listening plays two roles. The first to get sounds into your head regardless of whether you know the meaning or not and the second to act as a review to strengthen your memory of words you already know.

We all have movie lines stuck in our head, even ones from childhood. It's very common for humans to repetitively read, watch or listen to content they find enjoyable. There is a sense of comfort, especially for children, who you will find will want to watch the same movie every night or want you to read them the same story over and over.

The best part about this kind of repetitive listening and having what we could call sound bites stuck in your head is that, when you do find the meaning, your brain retroactively fills in the meaning for other phrases that contain the new information.

By listening to music along side studying the language we can take advantage of the repetitive fairly low scope of vocabulary used in songs. to get them stuck in our heads. This leads to the second advantage of reviewing words that we already know or kind of know.

What exactly do I mean by reviewing words? By 'review' I am referring to an instance by where you hear or see a word. The way memory works is that we progressively remember things for longer periods of time the more we see them. In your native language there are likely thousands of words that you could never forget even if you tried.

This also extends to things like, your school route or your house and it's surroundings. This is because you have repeatedly exposed yourself to those things many times over a long period of time. We can take advantage of the addictive nature of songs and their lyrics, to give us opportunities to listen to the language.

However let us remember that just by simply listening and never actively looking up words, translations or actively studying the language, it will be almost impossible to pick up the meaning naturally. If you know Koreans you can use the sounds that will be stuck in your head to ask them for the meaning but if you do not have that resource available don't expect to become fluent in Korean.

Using Kpop to learn Korean

The main problem I can see with Kpop specifically is that they are often infused with English. For example let's take the very popular song Butter by the very popular boy group BTS:

Smooth like butter, like a criminal undercover
Gon' pop like trouble breaking into your heart like that (ooh)
Cool shade, stunner, yeah, I owe it all to my mother
Hot like summer, yeah, I'm making you sweat like that (break it down)

Wait, the whole song is in English, or the first chorus of Blood, Sweat and Tears(피 땀 눈물):

내 피 땀 눈물도
내 몸 마음 영혼도
너의 것인 걸 잘 알고 있어
이건 나를 벌받게 할 주문
Peaches and cream
Sweeter than sweet
Chocolate cheeks
And chocolate wings
But 너의 날개는 악마의 것
너의 그 sweet 앞엔 bitter bitter

This one is much more cherry picked as the song is mostly in Korean outside of this section.

On a positive note the good part about the most popular bands is that they have subtitles for many languages on their videos. Not only music videos but the extra videos and backstage content. These are great if you use them intelligently but likely pointless for learning Korean if you only focus on them.

To get the most out of them it is a good idea to view both the English lyrics and the Korean lyrics. When you can see how the words are written it gives you a stronger connection to the word. Seeing a translation can help you develop an understanding of words and phrases, however due to the nature of word order and untranslatable words, sometimes you may find the words do not match the translation 1:1.

So using Kpop we definitely would be able to get a decent grasp of the language, especially in a literary sense as a lot of song lyrics may not be phrased in the way people would express a similar thought in conversation as they are trying to be creative or using words that fit the beat better.

If we extend the realm of Kpop to the other content available by kpop groups, such as the content available on vlive or their TV appearances. Then we would definitely have enough content to learn the language. I will not however say that one could learn Korean just by listening to songs alone.

MAMAMOO's YouTube Channel Content

If you are intending to learn Korean and are very much in love with Kpop then I would take the following approach. Firstly learn Hangeul(한글), then find a bunch of songs you like and find the lyrics for them in Korean and English, this you can then use as content to listen to that you have studied meaning you will be more likely to pick out words.

If you wish to put more effort into learning Korean outside of Kpop itself then I would suggest boosting your knowledge actively by reading through grammar guides and vocabulary books to boost your understanding quicker. When you hit a certain level you will no longer need to actively look for other sources outside of Kpop music and Kpop content. You can find my recommended way to go about this in the Korean Fluency Path.

Whether you're a big Kpop stan or just an avid kpop listener who is looking to learn Korean, hopefully this article has provided enough information for you to get started. Let me know in the comments if there is anything else you would like to be covered.

I don't listen to Kpop much but I listen to Korean music of many genres, I will leave a playlist below for those that are interested.

Retro Learns Korean

Can You Learn Korean from Kpop?

Using Kpop to learn Korean

For related posts please check out these pages:

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