Learn Korean for Travel, Work and Study

Hangul has fourteen basic consonants and ten basic vowels, with compounds built from them, and each syllable is written as a block: a consonant, a vowel and an optional final consonant arranged in a square. The design is visible — the letter for “n” shows the tongue touching the ridge behind the teeth, the letter for “m” is a closed mouth — and a learner reads signs on the first evening. What Hangul does not show is that consonants come in threes: a plain, an aspirated and a tense version of each stop, so that “bul”, “pul” and “ppul” are fire, grass and horn, and the tense one, said with the throat tightened, has no English equivalent. Vowels are pure, there are no tones, and Korean distinguishes no r from l.

The grammar is Japanese-shaped and, to a Japanese speaker, oddly familiar. The verb stands last; the noun's role is marked by a particle after it — “-i/-ga” for the subject, “-eul/-reul” for the object, “-e” for place and time — and the subject is dropped whenever it is obvious, so that a complete Korean sentence can be one conjugated verb. Verbs do not change for person, and adjectives conjugate like verbs. Counting uses two systems: native Korean numbers for counting objects, people and hours, Sino-Korean numbers for dates, money, minutes and anything mathematical — so “two o'clock thirty minutes” uses both in one phrase — with counter words chosen by the kind of thing counted.

Speech levels are the heart of the matter. The verb ending tells the listener how the speaker places them: the polite “-yo” form, safe with almost anyone a foreigner meets; the formal “-seumnida” of news, announcements and the military; the plain form for close friends and juniors; and honorific infixes that raise the subject of the sentence when it is someone's grandmother or boss. The choice follows age and rank more than intimacy, so Koreans ask a new acquaintance's age within minutes to know how to speak, and address each other by role — “seonsaengnim”, teacher, “sajangnim”, boss — or by kinship terms: “oppa” and “hyeong”, older brother, “eonni” and “nuna”, older sister, used for friends a year or two older. First names alone are for equals and juniors.

Standard Korean is the speech of Seoul, taught in every school and heard on every broadcast; the regions keep accents and some words — the Busan and Gyeongsang dialect is the one Koreans imitate for comedy — and the Korean of the North has diverged in vocabulary and in its avoidance of English loanwords. About six in ten Korean words are of Chinese origin, which is why Chinese and Japanese learners find the vocabulary half familiar, and modern Korean borrows English freely and reshapes it: “haendeupon”, hand phone, “apateu”, apartment. Korean is a language with no proven relatives; the resemblance to Japanese is structural and much argued.

The US Foreign Service Institute files Korean with Japanese, Chinese and Arabic, at some 2,200 hours of class before an English speaker works comfortably in it, and the reasons are the speech levels, the back-to-front sentence and a vocabulary with no cognates; the alphabet, uniquely in the group, costs almost nothing. Learners typically read Hangul in a day, order food and introduce themselves within three months, hold a polite everyday conversation within a year, and then spend a long stretch on the grammar that natural Korean speech compresses — contracted endings, dropped subjects, the hundreds of sentence-final particles that change the tone — before the dramas become comprehensible without subtitles.

Seoul is signed in English, its subway announces in four languages, and its young people manage English with effort; shops, restaurants beyond the tourist districts, taxis, clinics and the immigration office run in Korean, and translation apps carry the visitor who has none. Korean companies work in Korean, from the chaebol to the start-up, and a foreigner's career in them opens with the TOPIK; the English-speaking jobs are in global firms, universities and the English-teaching sector, and are fewer than newcomers expect. Universities teach most degrees in Korean, admit foreign students at TOPIK 3 and often require TOPIK 4 to graduate; a growing number of programmes, above all at graduate level, are taught in English.

• An alphabet with a holiday: Korea is the only country with a public holiday for its alphabet; Hangul's inventor is said to have promised that a wise man could learn it in a morning and a fool in ten days.
• Letters shaped like the mouth: The consonant for “g” is drawn as the tongue's back rising to the palate, “n” as the tongue tip touching the ridge, “m” as closed lips: the shapes are diagrams of how to say them.
• Two sets of numbers: “Hana, dul, set” for counting things and telling the hour; “il, i, sam” for dates, money and minutes. Half past two is “du si samsip bun” — native two, Sino thirty.
• Did you eat?: “Bap meogeosseoyo?” — have you eaten rice? — is a greeting that means “how are you?”, and the answer is “ne”, yes, regardless.
• Nunchi: The art of reading a room — knowing what people feel and want without being told — is a named skill in Korea, praised in children and expected in adults, and the reason Korean conversation leaves so much unsaid.
• Fighting!: “Hwaiting!”, from the English word, is what Koreans say to cheer someone on before an exam, a match or a hard day. It does not mean a fight.
• Fire, grass, horn: “Bul”, “pul”, “ppul” — three consonants where English hears one, and the tense third, said with a tightened throat, is the sound every learner works on longest.

Korean has one main certificate and one state programme that stands beside it. The TOPIK, the Test of Proficiency in Korean, is set by Korea's National Institute for International Education and sat several times a year in Korea and at centres in some eighty countries; TOPIK I reports levels 1 and 2, TOPIK II levels 3 to 6, across reading, listening and, at the upper levels, writing, with a speaking test now offered separately. Results are valid for two years. The KIIP, the Korea Immigration and Integration Programme, is the Justice Ministry's free course for foreign residents in six stages, from level 0 to level 5, which combines Korean language with Korean society and whose completion certificates substitute for the TOPIK in the residence system. For foreign workers in manufacturing, agriculture and fishing, a separate EPS-TOPIK set by the labour ministry's agency is the condition of the employment permit.

The residence system is built on these. Admission to a Korean-taught degree usually asks for TOPIK 3, and graduation for TOPIK 4; the points-based long-term residence visa scores TOPIK levels and KIIP stages; permanent residence is reached with KIIP level 5 or an equivalent TOPIK result; and naturalisation requires completing the KIIP's final stage and its citizenship course, or passing the Justice Ministry's written test and interview in Korean. The Employment Permit System's E-9 visa requires a pass in the EPS-TOPIK before a worker is matched with an employer. Korean employers treat TOPIK 4 as the threshold for working in the language and TOPIK 5 or 6 as professional command. With steady classes most adults reach TOPIK 2 within a year, TOPIK 3 in about eighteen months and TOPIK 4 in two to three years.

Korean has the richest set of free learner's resources of any Asian language, built on the wave of interest its culture created: a complete grammar course in podcasts and books that has taught millions, a dictionary app made by the country's largest internet company with example sentences from real usage, and an endless supply of drama, music and variety television with Korean subtitles a click away. The self-learner needs those three, a flashcard deck with native audio for the three-way consonants, and a tutor for the speech levels, which no recording corrects.

What a tutor gives in Korean is the ear and the register. A learner never hears their own tense consonants or their “eo” and “eu” until a Korean says the word back, and the speech levels — when the “-yo” form, when the formal, when a friend becomes a friend and the endings drop — are learned in conversation with someone who knows the learner's age and situation and can say which ending fits. A tutor also supplies the compressed, dropped-subject Korean of real speech that the textbooks and the TOPIK do not use.