How to improve my Korean?
Korean is an East Asian language spoken by about 77 million people. It is the official and national language of both Koreas: North Korea and South Korea, with different standardized official forms used in each country. Learning a language is not easy and for someone like me who wants to get better in Korean, it’s an everyday struggle. This is why I keep trying new ways of studying every time until I find what works best for me. To make things easier for you, I’ve gathered a list of what seems to be the most efficient ways for progression.
Here are 8 ways that I am using to improve my Korean:
Make Korean Friends
Making friends in a country you are not in may seem quite tricky, but it’s actually a lot easier than it seems.The easiest way is obviously going to South Korea and meeting them there. However, this is not an opportunity that is given easily.
Learn Korean Online
There are loads of ways you can practise Korean online and even some that you can find for free. There is a great collection to learning Korean websites that you can use to whatever level you need. You can work your way through the material at a pace that works for you and the best thing about learning online is that you can do it pretty much wherever you are. You simply need an internet connection.
Find A Korean Language Partner
Another thing you can do to improve your Korean is to try and speak as much as possible and a great way to do this is to find a Korean language partner. Using websites like italki or hello talk you can search for Koreans who want to learn English and organise language exchanges with them so you practise your Korean and English at the same time.
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Start A Korean Diary
One of the things people often have trouble with is writing. People can normally read much better than they can write. This is common and there’s nothing wrong with it, but to get over that intermediate plateau and to improve your Korean you will need to improve your writing skills. And a great way to do this is by keeping a diary. If you write in a diary every single day then even if you’re not talking about anything interesting, you’ll find that your writing improves dramatically.
Watch Korean Dramas
Korean dramas are famous worldwide and watched in many countries outside of Korea. They’re dramatic, fun, filled with beautiful people and most useful for you, they speak Korean. Start watching Korean dramas every day even if just for ten minutes and your Korean skills will slowly start to improve, at least your listening skills will. You’ll also get to immerse yourself in Korean culture while you’re learning which is an incredibly important part of language learning.
Find A Book You Love And Read It In Korean
If you’re not quite ready to read Korean books yet why not find a book that you already love and know the story of and read it in Korean. That way you’ll know what’s happening and you’ll be able to work out what a lot of the words mean based on the context and your knowledge of the story. This is a really useful way to improve your comprehension skills and you’ll also find that you enjoy revisiting these stories that you know and love so much.
Watch Kids’ Shows In Korean
When talking to some of my Korean friends about how they were learning English, one method that was brought up pretty often was by watching kids’ shows.
Although it may seem a little bit unusual or doubtful, it’s actually such a great method of learning. Indeed, that’s how kids learn their native language after all. So I decided to try it out myself and now when I’m really bored I try to do it as often as I can. It might be a bit boring sometimes, but it actually really helps.
Make up a story with a new grammar structure that you’ve just learnt
Being able to build sentences in a different language is so satisfying. It brings you one step closer to the ability to express yourself freely. But obviously, in order to so, you need to learn new grammar structures. However, just like vocabulary, they’re easy to forget. That’s why one of the best solutions, in my opinion, is to use them as much as you can. Making up a story and writing it down using that structure several times will facilitate the remembering process of that novelty.
These were 8 ways that I am using in order to improve my Korean. I hope some of these tips might be useful to some of you.
No matter where you are with your Korean it can be common to get to a stage where you feel like you’re not moving forward anymore but don’t worry, you can still improve your Korean, you just need time and persistence and sometimes to try something new.