Read Korean

Ten lessons, free, no account. Every sound is taught three ways at once: a cross-section of your own mouth showing where the tongue and lips go, the phonetic symbol, and a recording. Romanization is available on every page for reference, switched off by default — we would rather you did not learn from it, and the last section explains why.

The ten lessons

What you will be able to do at the end

1. Look at any Korean word and say it out loud, including words you have never seen and do not understand.
2. Produce ㅡ, and hear the difference between ㄱ, ㅋ and ㄲ — the two things that separate beginners from everyone else.
3. Explain why 한국어 is pronounced [한구거], instead of memorising it as an exception.
4. Read a menu, a sign, or a message without a transliteration crutch anywhere in sight.

Use it for reference. Do not study from it.

You will find romanized Korean everywhere — on menus, in song titles, in most beginner material. Refusing to look at it would be silly. Learning from it is a different thing, and this is the case against it.

1. Your eyes build a detour and then keep it. Read enough romanization and you stop going from the letter straight to the sound; you go 한글 → Latin letters → sound. It is slower, it collapses the moment you meet a word nobody has romanized for you, and it does not wear off on its own. People who started this way are still doing it a decade later.
2. The Latin letters promise sounds Korean does not have. One letter has to cover several Korean sounds: the same k stands for ㄱ, for ㅋ and for ㄲ depending on where it sits. Others describe a sound English does not write that way anywhere — nothing about the pair of letters used for ㅡ tells an English speaker to put the tongue high and back with the lips flat. The diagram tells you that in one glance.
3. The official system leaves information out on purpose. Tense consonants created by sound changes are not written down: 학교 is romanized the same way it would be if the second consonant were the plain one, even though it is not. Read it back from the Latin and you say the wrong word. Switch the button on and compare 학교 with its actual pronunciation, 학꾜, to see the gap.