So, it’s been almost a year since I started learning Korean. I’ve had a lot of “had I known this when I first started” moments to be honest. But, that’s what life and learning is about, right?

My answer would be, focus more an listening and speaking Korean than writing Korean at first. Writing hangul is easy. Listening to and speaking Korean is where much of the difficulty lies—at least for me. Sound change rules can throw you for a loop if you’re not careful. Also, try to get comfortable with sentence structure, formulating sentences in your head, and saying them out aloud.

That’s my 2 cents.

I want to come back to this after I’ve reached a year of study and see if my answer has changed at all.

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    @raonah @delsatu What about you guys?

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      I think learning Hangul is important so you can understand what the different sounds are and try to distinguish them but listening and speaking are also really important. I’ve focused mostly on reading and writing and got ok at those but I can hardly understand anything by listening and I really can’t speak at all 😭😭

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        Try watching dramas without subs, write down what you understand from the dialogues and then watch them again with subs and compare, this helped me a lot!

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        I agree that you should understand hangul but that could come much easier than listening and speaking. But I think at the beginning more focus should be put on listening and speaking because people might end up like us as we are now–although I’m pretty sure you’re no where near that bad at listening atm. 🤣🤣🤣

        Actually, one of the reasons why I’m more convinced that listening and speaking should come first is because of how some words are pronounced. Like English, not all words are pronounced as they are spelled or follow the rules that are given. Simple one would be 감사합니다. Granted, there aren’t many like that that I know of, but yeah.

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      Reading, speaking, listening and writing, I find that I need a bit of all of those to actually make any real progress in Korean… My advice to myself would be: do not underestimate practicing prononciation, since your face muscles must get used to these new sounds; keep your ears open for the grammar structures and vocabulary you have learned when watching dramas; don’t be afraid to make mistakes because it is how your brain works!

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    I learned the Hangul 1st because I liked writing the words I heard (songs, mostly), but honestly Korean sentence-structure is the exact same as my native language so it was easier for me to learn, also it helps that they’re both gender-less languages!

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