How to Learn Korean in 2021

As the new year comes around, there may be many more people who are looking to pick up a language as part of their new year's resolutions or new year's goals. If you found this article then most likely you are looking to learn Korean, A language that continues to grow in popularity every year.

If you've just started or are looking to start, then this article will outline the key aspects of language learning and how you can apply them to Korean. Later, I will introduce places where you can find almost any type of Korean content to enjoy.

Whatever your reason for learning Korean, you must understand that learning a language is a long term pursuit. You will have the most success by treating it as a part of your life rather than a skill that you learn. To put it into perspective you will be looking at a minimum of a year to feel like you have a basic understanding and probably around 2-5 years to feel comfortable.

Before we begin I recommend bookmarking my Korean Fluency Path so that you can refer back to it later. It covers the first 2 years of the learning journey. After around 6 months you will likely have graduated from using learner's materials and have moved on to content created for natives.

How to Master the Korean Number Systems

This article is going to presume that you have at least the knowledge of the number systems, although as we all know knowledge is not acquisition. I will try to cover some strategies you can use to better help remember the numbers and also make it more natural to read them in Korean.

As anyone who has tried to learn another language will know it's very difficult to read a written arabic number without defaulting to saying it in your native language. I know many people who are extremely fluent in English and say they always count in their native language. However our aim should be to at least be comfortable with numbers so that we can tell people things like our age or our birth date.

I've found while learning Korean that numbers come up very often in various ways and it has become beneficial for my reading speed and understanding to be able to automatically know the number in Korean. For reference I will refer to 일, 이, 삼 as the Sino-Korean system and 하나, 둘, 셋 as the pure Korean system.

Talk to Me in Korean Advanced Idiomatic Expressions Reference List

Starting at Level 8 TTMIK added idiomatic expression lessons based on 1 word. Here the list is compiled for easy access with links to each lesson. There is also an Anki deck available which covers the idioms from the collaboration between TTMIK and Naver.

• TTMIK Grammar points list
• Hanja(word builder) lessons list

The Role of Anki in Language Learning

I've been wanting to write about this for a while. I see a lot of people over complicate their experience with Anki and even shy away from using it all together because they perceive it to be more complicated than it is. The first thing I will state is that all the content within this article is based off of my own opinion of the software from how I've used it and how I've seen others use it.

The first thing to note is that Anki is merely a supplement to your learning. The reason and method of using Anki will vary throughout your language learning journey. However one should not feel obligated to use it at any point. Once it becomes boring or you forget the reason you're even using it, then simply just stop.

You can download for free Anki here:

• for PC and Mac
• for Android devices 
  

Lingo Mastery's Korean Short Stories for Beginners Review

Lingo Mastery have been making language learning content for a while now and finally have got round to stories for Korean learners. Hopefully this means that they will continue to make content and we can look forward to more Korean content from them. As you may know from my previous posts, I consider reading to be the best way to learn a language, so I am always interested in new reading and story content for Korean.

Previously I have reviewed Olly Richards' Short Stories in Korean for Intermediate Learners and Billy Go's Korean Reading Made Simple. All of these books seem to offer different things for the learner and While reading through this book, I found out something about reading that I had not really considered the specifics of. If you would like to check out Lingo Mastery's full selection click here.

Should You Learn Korean?

Should you learn Korean? Should I learn Korean? Should I learn a language? Perhaps you have pondered about this before? Perhaps are thinking of starting to learn a language or just recently started learning a language and are wondering if it's for you? I'm going to presume you clicked this article because you fall into one of these two categories.

It's very normal to have doubts when starting or before starting on a long term goal. Partly doubt of whether you will succeed and partly doubt of whether you think the investment is worth it. I'm sure we all have the same doubts when it comes to spending the valuable resources, time and money.

I want to focus on whether one should learn Korean as a western native language speaker. If you already know or were raised with a Sino-language then the journey will be easier, similarly as it would for a native English speaker to learn, say, a romance language. Because of the huge time commitment required, there are what some would consider good reasons and bad reasons to even start in the first place.