Learning Korean for Beginners

This is the first and unavoidable step. Don't sleep on it. You might be tempted to use romanization at first, but ask anyone who's learned Korean and they'll tell you two things: one, learning Hangeul is easier and quicker than you'd expect, and two, romanization isn't an exact science. You'll end up learning the wrong pronunciation, and it's hard to fix later.

One typical example I see all the time is the city of Busan (부산). It was romanized for a long time as "Pusan," when it really should be "Busan." I've heard so many foreigners still pronounce the city name with a "P" sound because of this.

There are plenty of videos and apps that will teach you Hangeul in a few hours. After that, it's just a matter of practice. I don't want to promote any particular app or video, but honestly, any top video that comes up when you search "Learn Hangeul" on YouTube will do the job.

Funny personal story: when I started learning Korean, I taught myself Hangeul first to get a head start before enrolling in a Korean language school. I thought I'd be the smart guy who showed up already prepared. When I enrolled at Sogang, they asked if we already knew how to read Hangeul. I realized I'd messed up when I saw the other students, mostly Chinese and Japanese, already reading and writing so much better than I could. The teacher didn't waste any time on it either, since everyone else already knew how to read.

This is probably one of the hardest things to grasp when learning a new language. When you study a language with a different structure than your mother tongue, it takes ages to get used to. It's extremely frustrating, and you're lucky if your native language shares Korean's word order, which is subject, object, verb.

You constantly have to remind yourself of that, and it makes literal translation nearly impossible. If I had to start over, I'd force myself to think in Korean instead of translating from my own language. Not sure if that makes sense, but take the sentence "John reads a book." In Korean, it comes out as "John a book reads." Doing that mental gymnastics all the time is exhausting at first, and the sooner you truly understand and embrace the new structure, the better.

I gave you the good news, now it's time for the bad one. Honorifics matter a lot more than you'd want to admit. I have plenty of friends who studied Korean, and at the beginning they all told me it doesn't really matter as long as you try, since Koreans will understand you're a foreigner who doesn't know all the rules yet. True and not true. I'm French, and we have honorifics too, but we often skip them to avoid awkward social situations. When we meet someone for the first time, we usually just ask each other if it's okay to speak informally. In Korea, almost no one does that. There are a lot of rules tied to age, position at work, and so on, and using the wrong honorific can come across as genuinely rude.

Let me clarify though, there are three primary honorific levels (with some nuances for later):

• 야 - Informal, used with friends or people younger than you
• 이에요 / 이세요 - Formal, used with people older than you or strangers, like a coffee shop worker
• 입니다 - Super formal, the highest honorific, used in business or on TV

Whatever your grammar book says, the "super formal" isn't vital to learn right away. Just know it exists for now.

The formal one is basically the standard, and the safest, most useful choice. It works in most situations, and nobody will hold it against you for using formal speech with someone younger.

Funny story for this one too: back when I was dating a Korean girl and couldn't speak Korean yet, I searched online for how to say "I love you" in Korean. It told me the answer was 사랑합니다, which is a cute, harmless mistake, but years later, with my current understanding of Korean, I feel a bit embarrassed about it.

My last point is about speaking as naturally as possible. I'm not totally sure why, but in Korean, the way learners talk at the beginning sounds strange and a bit childish. Let me explain. In English, when you learn how to answer "What is your name?", you probably learn to say "My name is Brian," "I am Brian," or "You can call me Brian," and all of those sound completely natural, native speakers use them too.

Now here comes Korean. In school or from a textbook, you'll probably learn to say "저는 브라이언 입니다" or "제 이름은 브라이언 입니다," which honestly sounds a bit awkward.

Most Koreans would just say "브라이언 이라고 합니다" instead, and the bad news is you'll almost never see this in a textbook. My advice is to either learn the natural way to say things through Korean friends, or just shorten your answers. Koreans shorten pretty much everything anyway in this fast paced culture. If someone asks your name, just say "브라이언 이에요" (I'm Brian). Not perfect, but way more natural than the textbook version.