Speak To Me In Korean

Getting Started With Speak To Me In Korean

I've been using Speak To Me In Korean for about four years now, and I keep coming back to it even though the interface hasn't changed much in that time. The core method is straightforward: each lesson builds around a short, natural conversation, and you listen, repeat, and work through comprehension questions before moving forward. There are about twelve levels spread across beginner to intermediate material, and the audio is recorded by native speakers rather than robotic text-to-speech, which actually makes a difference in how your ear adapts. The app itself costs around fifteen dollars upfront, and once you buy it you get all twelve levels. There is no subscription model hiding behind the purchase, which is rare for apps in this space. I downloaded it on an iPhone and it synced fine across my iPad without any account creation nonsense. The Android version works the same way. If you're trying to use it on a desktop browser, the mobile apps are really the only intended way to run it. There is a companion workbook you can buy separately, but honestly it is mostly just PDF transcripts and answer keys you could print yourself if you wanted to save money. One thing I wish I had known before starting: the app requires you to have decent audio output. I tried using it once on a laptop with tinny built-in speakers and kept mishearing consonants like versus because the distinction was getting crushed. Switching to basic earbuds fixed that immediately. You do not need expensive headphones, just something that actually reproduces the sound clearly.

How the Lessons Actually Work

Each lesson starts with a listening exercise where you hear a short dialogue between two people. The conversations are usually two or three minutes long, and you get three passes through the audio before you can proceed. The first pass is just pure listening, no text on screen. The second pass gives you the Korean transcript below the player, and the third pass highlights each word in the transcript as it is spoken. After that, you get vocabulary breakdowns, grammar notes, and comprehension questions. The real trick people miss is the spacing between those three listens. If you blast through them in rapid succession, your brain essentially hears the same recording three times and you think you understand it when you actually have not. I started waiting about thirty seconds between each listen, and the comprehension jump from pass one to pass two became dramatically sharper. Your ear needs a moment to actually separate the sounds before it gets overloaded again. Grammar explanations are concise, sometimes too concise. They give you the pattern and a couple of examples, but they do not go deep into edge cases or historical reasons why things work the way they do. If you are someone who needs to understand the mechanics behind the grammar, you will pair this app with a textbook like Integrated Korean or How to Study Korean for the fuller picture. Using both together cuts down on the confusion that comes from vague grammar notes.

Where It Actually Fails

I need to be straight about the limitations here. The app stops being useful around the end of level six or so. After that point, the conversations get more complex, but the app does not add systematic vocabulary review or spaced repetition. You will forget words from level two by the time you reach level eight because there is no mechanism forcing you to revisit them. I noticed this happening to me around late 2023 when I realized I could still understand level one dialogues but had forgotten entirely how to use the word for "experience" which appeared in level three. Another hard limit is the lack of speaking feedback. The app asks you to repeat phrases out loud, but it cannot actually evaluate whether your pronunciation is correct. It records your voice and plays it back, which is marginally helpful, but it will not tell you if your tones or consonant endings are off. For pronunciation work, I ended up supplementing with a service like italki and booking a tutor once a week specifically to check my speech. That added roughly twenty to thirty dollars a month on top of the app cost, so factor that in if you care about sounding natural rather than just readable. The app also has a notable bug in the older versions where the progress tracking resets after a major iOS update. I lost about two weeks of completed lesson data when my phone was restored from an old backup after an update. The developer said they added server-side syncing in a later patch, but I never saw any confirmation that this actually happened. Backing up your progress manually by taking screenshots or noting your level in a spreadsheet is probably worth the thirty seconds it takes.

What to Expect Over Time

If you spend about twenty minutes a day on the app and actually do the listening exercises rather than letting them play in the background while you scroll through your phone, you can reasonably expect to finish all twelve levels in three to five months. The material in the first six levels covers survival Korean: ordering food, asking for directions, basic introductions, and simple past and present tense. Levels seven through twelve push into more complex sentence structures and longer conversations that involve opinions and descriptions. The companion website at speaktomeinkorean.com hosts the lessons as free audio and text if you do not want to buy the app, but the interactive element of the app is what makes it work. The timed reveals and the three-pass listening structure force a kind of active engagement that passive listening online simply does not provide. I tried the free web version for a week and switched back to the app because I was catching myself skimming through lessons without really processing them. If your goal is purely to read Korean, this app is overkill and you might be better off investing time in a reader like Tadoku or KoReader with Korean texts. But if you want to actually understand spoken Korean and build a foundation for conversation, the app is one of the more honest tools available in its price range. It does not pretend to make you fluent, and it does not hide behind gamification tricks designed to keep you opening the app without actually learning anything.