General online Korean courses from Hangul to everyday conversation

A general Korean course teaches the language you need to introduce yourself, shop, make plans and talk about work and family. Most Korean courses do not use the CEFR, the European scale from A1 to C2. They follow their own textbook levels or the six levels of the TOPIK, South Korea's official Korean exam, because there is no official conversion between the TOPIK and the CEFR.

The first stage is short. Hangul, the Korean alphabet with 14 basic consonants and 10 basic vowels, takes many learners only a few days. After that the pace slows down. With three hours of class a week you collect about 130 class hours a year, which is usually enough for simple everyday conversations after one year. The US Foreign Service Institute (FSI), the language school of the US State Department, puts professional fluency in Korean at about 2,200 class hours of full-time training.

Korean confronts English speakers with three hurdles, and a well-planned general course takes them one after the other.

1 The script in the first week

Hangul builds syllable blocks from a consonant, a vowel and sometimes a final consonant, called batchim. A course that drops romanisation, the Latin spelling of Korean, after the first week makes you read Hangul from then on. Romanisation renders Korean sounds only roughly.

2 Three kinds of consonants and the sound rules

Korean distinguishes plain, aspirated and tense consonants, for example ㄱ, ㅋ and ㄲ, where English has two kinds. Spoken Korean also changes sounds at syllable borders, so gamsahamnida (thank you) is written with hab and spoken with ham. General courses drill these contrasts with listening tasks and recordings of your own voice from the first weeks.

3 Verb endings and speech levels

The verb comes last, small particles mark subject and object, and every sentence ends in a speech level. A speech level is the verb ending that shows how polite you are towards the other person. General courses start with the informal polite -yo form, which fits strangers and colleagues, and add the formal -nida form for announcements and presentations later.

A general Korean course follows a textbook through grammar, vocabulary, reading, listening and writing in Hangul. A conversation course puts speaking first and suits learners who already read Hangul and form simple -yo sentences. That point usually comes after the content of TOPIK level 2, the second of six levels of South Korea's official Korean exam.

Korean conversation courses have three tasks that general courses cover only briefly.

• They train switching between speech levels in role plays, for example with a shop assistant, a colleague and an older neighbour.
• They practise the sound rules in fluent speech, where syllables run together.
• They use short scenes from dramas at natural speed and turn the banmal that characters often use into polite forms. Banmal is the intimate speech level for friends and family.

You can combine both, for example with a general course twice a week and one conversation lesson a week once you read Hangul fluently.

Pronunciation decides which format suits a Korean beginner. In a one-to-one lesson by video, the teacher hears every plain, aspirated and tense consonant you produce and corrects it at once. In a group class of eight people, each learner speaks only a few minutes per lesson, and pronunciation errors often go unnoticed.

The King Sejong Institute Foundation is the South Korean government body that runs Sejong Institutes and online Korean courses worldwide.

Time zones matter for live lessons. Korea uses UTC+9 all year and does not switch to summer time. An evening lesson in North America falls on a Korean morning, which suits teachers living in Korea. An evening lesson in the UK falls in the Korean night, so learners in Europe usually book teachers who live in Europe or take lessons in the morning.

Recordings help with Korean in every format. You can replay the three consonant types as often as you need and compare your own voice with the teacher's.

Many teenagers come to Korean through K-pop and dramas, and online courses for this age group often use songs and scenes as material. Hangul suits young learners, because its letters follow a visible system and children can read their first words within days.

Courses for children and teenagers need two things that adult learners usually bring themselves.

1. They teach polite forms from the start. Teenagers who learn mainly from dramas copy banmal, the intimate speech level, and then use it with teachers and adults.
2. They keep live units short and mix reading, singing and speaking, so that a video lesson does not turn into a lecture.

Data protection applies to every online course for minors. In the EU, a service that relies on consent needs a parent's approval for children under 16, and each EU country may lower that age to 13. In the USA, COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, requires verifiable parental consent before a service collects personal data from children under 13. Ask the provider whether lessons are recorded and who can see the recordings.