Korean Language Resources — Our Favourites / What We Used

No salesy rubbish, these are just the best resources to learn Korean online. Most of these are free, but some have a small cost (e.g. books or tutors).

There are lots of lists on the internet of “best resources” for learning Korean, but they’re full of dead links, or just links to the same old tired apps that I have long felt (after decades of language study) are a waste of time.

Yes, we think you should use a few apps we use for everything (like you can’t find a tutor without italki), but I want to put a legit list of Korean-specific tools, the likes of which are often recommended on Reddit’s /r/korean sub.

We initially wrote this guide before arriving in Korea, but updated it after our three-month stint learning Korean more intensively.

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Seemile Korean on YouTube

This is the video course that I got started on. It teaches the basics.

Watching and studying this Seemile Korean is equivalent to sitting through a lot of Korean classes — it’s saving me a lot of time and money!

Seemile has a ton of really great resources on YouTube for learning Korean.

I’m looking through the playlist called “Korean Mastering Class In a Month“, and doing the videos. It’s an excellent introduction to the way Korean works.

In each class, the teacher takes you through a few grammar concepts (like past tense), then gives a bunch of verbs, adjectives, and nouns to make sentences, and shows you how it’s done. She really makes it easy to understand. The comments on the videos are beautiful.

The host takes you through all grammar concepts you need to communicate effectively in Korean, from A-Z.

How to Study Korean — A Complete Korean Course online

The website “How To Study Korean” is a one-stop resource for learning Korean grammar that’s totally free. This is an indispensable resource for me, a place I go to look up how to say certain things like past tense, or to say “to have to”.

You can learn Korean using this website alone, though it’d be a bit of a slog. I use it more as a reference. After years of study I still end up on some of its pages by googling for grammar terms.

They provide detailed, accurate, and clear explanations every step of the way – from learning how to read all the way to advanced grammar.

They’ve also promised every lesson will always be free. The website is ad-supported.

Every lesson has

1. Twenty to thirty new words (you don’t have to learn them, in fact I think it’d be overkill to do so)
2. Grammar tailored to the specific level of study
3. Audio recordings, including for complete sentences

It’s really impressive and I highly recommend it! I liked the lessons and list of 200 hanja (Chinese characters) that are important for Korean learners to know, along with explanations of how you see them in everyday life.

The core lessons and audio remain free. The site also sells optional PDF lesson compilations and workbooks, and has an ad-free mobile app.

Korean Anki flashcard decks by Evita — including free audio!

There are two awesome decks by Evita that are amazing Korean learning resources on their own.

You can learn so much Korean using just these decks.

This is just another reason why you need to use Anki rather than any other flashcard app. Anki may not be as pretty, but it has these shared decks which are like gold.

Anki is free on desktop and AnkiDroid is free on Android. The official AnkiMobile app for iPhone and iPad is a one-time US$24.99 purchase.

We put together a guide to getting started with Anki, and some tips for advanced usage once you’re done with that.

The first of Evita’s decks I recommend is Korean Grammar Sentences. These take you through the basics of Korean grammar with example sentences every step of the way, including pronunciation. Do it in order. It’s magic!

The second deck I recommend is her vocabulary deck, Korean Vocabulary. It even includes Hanja for words that are of Chinese origin.

Evita has a separate Hanja-only deck, but it isn’t as important as the decks above (and you’ll learn a lot of Hanja from the vocab pack).

Quick Korean by the Cyber University of Korea

Quick Korean is still a really amazing free online resource, but the official course has moved to a new website.

It’s now an open course that you can use on a computer or phone without going through the old account-only portal. There are still four levels, designed to take learners through roughly Level 4 grammar and Level 3 vocabulary on the TOPIK scale.

The programme is available in English, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. You can study through the Quick Korean website or its YouTube channel.

The videos are less dense than Seemile’s videos, which I prefer. But still: it’s a well-structured course, it’s free, and it remains one of the better classroom-style options online.

My Korean 1 & 2 — Free Textbooks

These are textbooks released by Monash University under a free (Creative Commons) license. Monash is a prominent Australian university where I happen to have studied. The textbooks are written by Young A Cho, In Jung Cho, and Douglas Ling.

Originally, they were supposed to be teaching aids for Monash’s own Korean course. But the authors have made them available under a Creative Commons licence.

If you’re looking for a Korean textbook with accompanying audio, even though we normally use books like Teach Yourself Korean (which I already bought!), this is free. Can’t argue with free, especially when it’s from a prominent university.

You can get them on the talking2koreans website, where you can download the textbooks, audio, and vocabulary lists.

Naver Korean-English Dictionary and Papago Translator

I used to use WordReference, but once I got to lower intermediate in Korean I realised that Naver has much better translation and so I prefer to use Naver’s dictionary.

Naver is a Korean web portal / search engine. But like Google, they have a lot of ancillary services, like a dictionary.

I like the Naver dictionary because it gives me many more options in English to Korean word searches. It also gives me the hanja (Chinese characters), which helps me with understanding word etymology — especially handy if you know Chinese or Japanese.

Naver also has a translator, Papago, that I prefer over Google Translate for multiple reasons — more consistent phrasing (not randomly changing voice / formality level), and even better text-to-speech.

Talk to Me In Korean (TTMIK) — Some great free content

Talk to Me in Korean deserves an honourable mention, but its structured course library is now a subscription product rather than a collection of individually priced lesson units.

TTMIK is a Korean-based educational website designed for self-study. Its catalogue has more than 1,700 lessons covering grammar, speaking, vocabulary, listening and pronunciation, with access through the website and mobile app. The company still publishes plenty of free material on YouTube, but the organised course sequence sits behind the subscription.

Pricing: As of 2026, the regular monthly plan is US$16.99 before tax and the standard yearly plan is US$122. TTMIK also offers discounted annual pricing at times, so check the current renewal price rather than assuming a temporary first-year offer will continue.

Korean Grammar in Use (Books)

I really like these books — Korean Grammar in Use. My tutor on italki works through them with me.

Each chapter has a very clear and concise explanation in English of a grammar concept with many examples and exercises of increasing difficulty.

I’ve used a lot of grammar resources and find them over-complicated or too wordy. But I really do like these books. I’d recommend them easily, and recommend working through them with a tutor.

What to de-prioritise for learning Korean

I’m no hater, I’m just trying to steer students in the right direction!

The below is my opinion — shared with many around the internet on Reddit and so forth — about some of the websites that are less helpful for learning Korean.

90-day Korean. It seems like a well-assembled website, and doesn’t seem bad. A lot of bloggers recommend 90-day Korean via their affiliate programme (which means the bloggers get commissions on sales).

However, with 90-day Korean:

1. You can now download free sample lessons, including its Hangul material, so at least you can inspect the teaching style before joining.
2. The complete Inner Circle courses, community and coaching are still reserved for paid members.
3. An older discussion on Reddit argues that much of the underlying material can be found free elsewhere.
4. I’m still sceptical of websites that are promoted heavily through affiliate marketing.

Various apps — Memrise, Drops, Duolingo: I like apps for two things. Firstly, teaching you the writing system. Secondly, a vocabulary of maybe your first 100 words. After that, apps are a game, not a great strategy for learning a language.

The problem is, after this point, many apps start to become less effective, and often just become inaccurate in pronunciation or content. Duolingo is very guilty of this.

There’s nothing wrong with games, especially those that stimulate your mind. Don’t take me as an app-hater. But I’m just saying if you want to learn Korean, I’d recommend the above sites and getting a tutor rather than going all-in on an app like Duolingo for hours a day.

KoreanClass101: Again, the 101 languages websites have a great commission program, which is why so many blogs promote them.

I like their vocab lists occasionally, when I find them by Googling. But I find the website clunky and difficult to learn from.

Glossika: I’m normally a fan of Glossika, but I didn’t like Glossika Korean when I used it. The sentences were too hard and I didn’t understand the grammar even after months of study. The voice also changed between colloquial, polite and formal without warning. Glossika has since rebuilt its app and now lets you try beginner Level A material for free, so I would test the current Korean course before treating my older experience as a final verdict.

Pimsleur: I used to use Pimsleur a lot to pick up basic phrases and vocabulary. It now has app subscriptions rather than only expensive course purchases: Korean Premium is US$19.95 a month and All Access is US$20.95 a month, both with a seven-day trial. I still wouldn’t use it as my main Korean course because the audio lessons are slow and don’t explain much grammar.

Rosetta Stone: I’ve never met anyone who learned a language using this software. Again, bloggers promote it because of incentives. I tried Rosetta Stone for multiple languages in times when they had little competition. It’s fun and well-assembled, but I vastly prefer Duolingo. Rosetta Stone now discounts its subscriptions and lifetime plan heavily, so price is less of an objection than it used to be; I still don’t think it’s a strong primary course for Korean.