Practice Korean Reading! 6 Spots to Access Learner Texts Instantly
Do you know how long it takes me to make 잡채 (japchae)?
Too long. And delivery is not even an option.
Folks who want learner-friendly Korean texts can find themselves in a similar predicament.
No longer! I’ve put together this list of the top spots to get great Korean learner reading material.
Contents
- How to Use Bilingual and Learner-friendly Texts for Korean Reading Practice
- Practice Korean Reading! 6 Spots to Access Learner Texts Instantly
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
How to Use Bilingual and Learner-friendly Texts for Korean Reading Practice
Whether you’re new to Korean reading, or just looking for support to help you improve, there are some simple ways to make sure your reading practice is worth it.
- Do regular intensive reading exercises that involve checking your understanding. For example, with bilingual texts, you can test yourself by translating a short passage and then checking your translation against the English version. Some of the resources below include other built-in exercises for intensive reading.
- Also read extensively for leisure without checking translations (at least not right away). This will help you widen your vocabulary, make reading less stressful and get you used to the idea of reading in Korean as a habit.
- Set up a schedule that incorporates both kinds of reading practice and enables you to look forward to your reading. You could do an intensive reading session in the morning as a way of gearing up for your day, and then an extensive reading session at night as a reward for your morning practice. Either way, arrange your Korean reading in a way that makes it feel like a positive addition to your life, so that you feel compelled to keep doing it.
- Combine your reading with other types of learning, particularly listening practice. If you do this, your different skills will help strengthen and reinforce one another. Some of the options below include audio features—make sure you use them!
Practice Korean Reading! 6 Spots to Access Learner Texts Instantly
KoreanClass101 YouTube Reading Playlists for Absolute Beginners and Beginners
These playlists of animated videos test your understanding of written Korean (or allow you to learn it from scratch) through common scenarios like buying a train ticket. You can logically deduce some word meanings from context, which helps your understanding of usage and aids memorization. In the videos, you’ll be looking at Hangul in a variety of situations, and you’ll be given a certain amount of time to interpret text, such as the information on your train ticket.
While these playlists don’t provide extensive materials for practice, they help you get used to practical reading in time-sensitive situations. Plus, they conveniently combine reading practice with listening practice, so you can work on your listening comprehension and your accent as you read.
The availability of content on the KoreanClass101 channel can vary for non-subscribers, but you can search within the channel to find reading resources for other levels, too, such as this video for advanced reading comprehension.
FluentU
FluentU is an app and web-based tool that teaches Korean through authentic videos like movie clips and music videos. The program’s interactive captions and quizzes naturally incorporate reading into the learning process, and you can always just click over to the Dialogue tab of any video and read the transcript.
You’ll find Korean subtitles and their English translations for each line in every video. Both of these can be turned on or off as needed.
FluentU’s customized quizzes give you personalized intensive reading practice through example sentences, video clips and a variety of literacy-improving exercises like fill-in-the-blanks and sentence reordering.
For extensive practice, you can simply browse through videos as you would on YouTube and watch whatever you like with accurate Korean captions.
Korean Comics
This is a nifty little blog that gives you short, entertaining comics to read with optional English translations beneath them (just hit the “English” option in the menu bar at the top of the page to hide the translations or make them visible). The translations include cultural notes—on everything from Korean brands of alcohol and hangover cures, to film, currency and street food. Since the comics are isolated into small blocks, you can take your time with them and use the translations and cultural notes to make them into intensive mini-lessons.
Naver’s Bilingual 만화 (Manhwa)
Naver offers two sites for online manhwa (comics), one in English and one in Korean (both linked above), with some webtoons being available in both languages. Manhwa is already great for learning through visual context clues, and the presence of English translations means that you can check your understanding.
“마음의 소리,” or “The Sound of Your Heart,” is a hugely popular South Korean webtoon by Jo Seok that has inspired not just one but two television series, both of which are currently available on Netflix. It applies a bizarre drawing style and an absurd sense of humor to everyday situations based on the author’s life, and is ongoing with new comics each week in both Korean and English, though for obvious reasons the translated version is behind the original.
To find more translated webtoons, it’s probably best to start with the Korean version of the site, because many of the comics on the English site aren’t by Korean speakers. If you find something that looks interesting and it’s somewhat well-known, you may be able to copy the title into Wikipedia and find the English title by switching the article language to English.
Lonweb Parallel Texts
Speaking of parallel texts, Lonweb has a few that span a whole variety of languages. You’re not going to find authentic Korean texts here, but you can read about the adventures of Daisy Hamilton the detective, with parallel texts in English, Korean and Romanized Korean (as well as audio).
A note about Romanization: If you’re reading this post and therefore presumably looking for Korean reading practice, I’d guess that you’ve probably already learned Hangul. If you haven’t, I’m not sure that I would recommend picking it up alongside Daisy Hamilton or the texts in these other sources. I mean, you can if you want to, but Hangul is so easy to learn that you’d be doing yourself a favor by taking at least a few minutes to go over the alphabet before beginning your reading endeavors.
Regardless of what point you’re at, though, I also don’t think it’s necessarily a disadvantage that Romanization is provided here. For one thing, the Romanization column in the middle separates the Hangul from the English, which pads you against getting distracted by the English translation as you’re reading in Korean. Also, along with the audio, you can use the Romanization in much in the same way you might use the translation—to check your understanding (in this case, of the pronunciation).
Life is full of little inconveniences.
But with the above resources, getting some Korean reading practice doesn’t have to be one of them.
Elisabeth Cook is a freelance writer who blogs at Lit All Over.
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
