What's the best way to learn Korean for someone who grew up understanding it?

Question

My parents are Korean and growing up they spoke to me in Korean and in English, and I mainly responded in English (which I highly regret now).

Some of the 'beginner' tutorials and tutors are not great because I can understand a fair amount but speaking in the correct grammar and pronunciation are difficult so I'm maybe not as beginner as learning each of the letters and how they sound, but also not advanced because putting sentences together is still difficult.

I've tried getting a tutor who will talk to me casually and then corrects my responses and sends the sentences in chat for me to read and study later, and I've also started watching many kdramas (korean audio with english subtitles), but am still trying to improve my grammar and speaking abilities.

Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to go about this?

Answer 1

Your situation is interesting. I'm a French native speaker and bilingual (English and French). For the last year I started to learn Korean language. First I had a personal Korean teacher and now it's my second semester at a University in Canada attending a Korean language course (level 3).

I think there's no secret, the only way you can master 한국어 is to practice, practice, practice and obviously the best is to do an immersion.

I personally think that you have to understand well the grammar rules to become good to build sentences.

You can slowly try to use Korean subtitles when you watch K-dramas. Lately I discovered something amazing for my Korean language learning. With Amazon prime video or Netflix you can easily rewind 1 second the videos you watch right? So first put the Korean subtitles, you pause the video after the actor/actress said his/her sentence, look at the sentence written in 한글, study it and try to understand (I also write it in my notebook) then rewind the video 1 second, pause it then switch the subtitles for English... magic you got the instantaneous translation. Plus it's an official translation because as you know, Korean is really contextual and there's a lot of homonyms. Translating in general is very hard.

I got 65% in my 한국어 시험 ;)

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