Looking for tips on how to study Korean in high school? Look no further. Whether you're preparing for a study abroad program in Korea such as Seoul SPARKS, NSLI-Y, YFU, Rotary International, etc. or just looking to improve your language skills from home, this is the right place to get started!
My name is Sarah, and I came to Korea as a fifteen-year-old high school student in 2013. I have been helping international students, and especially high school students, achieve their dreams of coming to Korea for the past twelve years, so I know a thing or two about what it takes to be successful in a study abroad program here in Korea!
Here's a brief timeline of my history with international education in Korea:
 |  |  |  |
15-year-old me in 2023 with my friends | My graduation from SNU in 2022 | Working as the RD for NSLI-Y Seoul in 2023 | The first day of Seoul SPARKS |
Throughout the past eleven years, I have met literally hundreds, possibly thousands of international students in Korea at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels. Nearly all of them wish they had studied more Korean before they came, but I have quite literally never, not even one time, met someone who wished they had studied less.
You definitely don’t have to be perfect, and there’s no magic proficiency level that makes you “qualified” or “not qualified” to come, so please don’t stress yourself out too much; even if you arrive with little or no Korean ability, you will still probably have a good time. However, each hour of study you put in before you come will put you in a position to have a better time when you come.
Most students applying to summer programs in Korea like NSLI-Y, Seoul SPARKS, etc. typically hear back about their admission status about 90 days prior to departure. This is roughly double the 45-ish-day program length, during which you will receive 120 hours of classroom instruction over six weeks.
90 days = 12.5 weeks → Study 5-ish hours a week → 12 x 5 = 60 hours |
If you start from zero and study for about an hour per weekday until then, you’ll get in about 60+ hours before departure. When you arrive, you’ll already be able to have simple conversations with Koreans, order food, introduce yourself, and function linguistically on the level of a student who has already been in Korea for three weeks.
Learn the Korean alphabet as soon as possible (it literally can be done in less than a day - it was designed to be intuitive and easy!). Then, focus on pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar - in that order of priority.
My reasoning is as follows:
Without good pronunciation, it doesn’t matter how good your vocabulary or grammar is because people cannot understand you.
Without vocabulary, it doesn’t matter how good your grammar is, because without words you can’t make sentences. If you know enough words, you can pick out bits and pieces of a sentence you’re hearing or reading, and this is often enough to figure out or communicate what is going on from context even without grammar.
Good grammar is of course important and helpful - and you will learn a lot of it during your program! However if you prioritize vocabulary towards the beginning, you will be able to get a lot more use out of the grammar you learn once in Korea.
Learning a language is a little like building a house, where pronunciation and phonetics are like clay, vocabulary is like bricks, and grammar is like the cement holding the bricks together.
Without clay, you can’t make bricks. Without bricks, there is nothing for the cement to put together. All three are needed to build a strong house, but some elements have to come first for the others to become useful.
Here are some resources you can use to start learning Korean today:
Learn Hangul
Learn Vocabulary
*If you know some Chinese or Japanese, I recommend “A Handbook of Korean Vocabulary” by Miho Choo.
Learn Grammar
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