Unfortunately I can't help much with learning grammar as I never dove into actually learning Korean due to a dislike of how it sounds. There's the "Tae Kim Japanese Grammar"-like approach for a Korean grammar guide at: https://www.howtostudykorean.com/ although I'm not a big fan of how overly simplified (and sometimes wrong due to the simplification) Tae Kim's approach for Japanese was. So I can't attest as to whether How To Study Korean makes the same mistakes or not.
As for writing - Korean is simple enough to read/write that you can simply find any Korean news source and practice writing the sentences as you read them.
You could also try checking the Korean-learning subreddit out as they have a lot of resources in one of their pinned threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/hw4gy0/the_ultimate...
Ha, one of my main motivations for wanting to learn Korean is how beautiful it sounds to me. Funny how that goes, diametrically different subjetive perceptions.
You can do exactly the same with other scripts, e.g. Japanese hirigana and katakana, which are fairly easy to learn, and also Arabic, which looks difficult, but is definitely learnable in an hour.
Japanese has similar stuff with their u-dropping, but not as complicated as Korean.
People get lazy - especially natives who don't get confused because it's how most natives will talk. For example, every word ending in "ing" in your comment could drop the "g" sound when spoken. Plenty of English speakers do that when speakin' and not many people would think anythin' of it until a frustrated person learnin' English asks why nobody is pronouncin' the endin' "g". Droppin', changin', and blendin' sounds is why learning a language by listenin' to natives speakin' is so important instead of crammin' textbooks all day.
Some might consider this a regional thing/accent and I'd argue that it both is and isn't. To the extent I tried to illustrate it would likely get seen as an accent but the occasional droppin' of it is somethin' I've heard across so many different English accents that I'd argue it isn't only an accent thing.
In the US it's mostly associated with a Southern accent and in England it would be the English Midlands like Brummie or Mancunian.
It’s extremely unfortunate but in the year 2024, there are still close to no language learning apps that will actually help you acquire a foreign language. I’ve been in this space for about 6 years and the only I can recommend are Anki (which isn’t even a LL app) and some more obscure ‘comprehensible input’ sites. Outside of that, there’s Netflix, Spotify, Audible and real life human interaction (but none of those are LL apps!)
It's happened to italki (now iKnow), Memrise, DuoLingo, and a few sites that were so short-lived I no longer remember what they were called.
My takeaway is that language learning apps are a lot like dating apps. They profit less if people actually learn a language and so can't be too good at their job because they'll bleed users faster than they can gain them - similar to dating apps. It needs to work just well enough that users are tricked into believing it is working but not so well that it actually works for most people.
It seems like the ETA before enshittification begins is about 2~3 years. If you're an early enough adopter you might actually benefit from it but you have to be willing to jump ship and not fall for the engagement/gamification tactics that keep you sticking around after it has stopped providing any value.
I spent way too long 'watering my garden' on Memrise before I looked around and noticed all of the once useful community-providing mnemonics were gone, you couldn't correct bad definitions anymore, it was difficult to actually speak to anyone else in the community (unless you could find them on the forums), and eventually I stopped using it altogether. The community I had signed up for and was a huge part of Memrise's success no longer existed.
This might be why some of the best language-learning content I have seen is from national broadcasters like YLE in Finland. There, once a foreigner learns the language from that material, they then become a consumer of the broadcaster’s main content.
This is actually a remarkably common failure pattern for a lot of language learning apps. Devs see Anki and think "I'm gonna do it better! I'm gonna build Anki, but for a specific language and make it a web app." ... I've lost count how many of these I've seen over the years!
> It seems like the ETA before enshittification begins is about 2~3 years
It's funny, I actually learned the term "enshittification" specifically from friends of mine who were Memrise users. It's honestly a textbook example of the phenomena.
Negativity aside though, I'm actually pretty optimistic about this space despite all that I've seen so far. I think that there's genuinely room to build great language learning software that people will really benefit from. I'm just really pessimistic about most of the people working in the space. Without trying to exagerrate, I'd estimate that probably less than 10% of people working in the language learning industry are actual language learners (at best, they might've learned English as a kid). When you're not actively, seriously learning a language, you become numb to the problems of people who actually care about becoming fluent and just end up building tinder-esque games to addict people with.
(Hardcore linguaphiles are aware of these books, and have been one of the major demographics in the ebook filesharing scene that led to LibGen and Anna’s Archive. But I’m talking about the ordinary people you constantly see on e.g. Reddit who are just moving to another country, have to learn the language, and assume that one uses an app for that.)
I don't want to recommend the specific app I used, because it's the only one I tried, and I don't know how well it compares to other, similar apps. But there are a bunch of story-based language learning apps on App Stores. My suspicion is that most of them work relatively well, particularly compared to more typical modern language learning apps like Duolingo.
Unlike gamified apps like Duolingo, you do need to actually have the motivation to regularly use them, though. They're not going to entice you with funny animations and points and leaderboards and notifications and all of those things.
That's the gist of it. Never in history there was so much content in foreign languages and education material available that easily and for free, including not only writing but audio too (songs, movies). The thing is one has to go through it, and it's taking effort over a long time to get good, which is why most quit.
Making it because I believe there's lots of opportunity for high quality Korean learning content.
Also found it annoying that the majority of content out there does not mention other quality resources since they want to keep you in their own (lacking) ecosystem to sell you on their books, coaching sessions, Anki vocabulary cards or whatever it is.
Want to improve my own Korean by teaching it to others.
Also making a site currently that aims to gamify the learning with flashcards, similar to some(!) questions you might see on Duolingo but with your flashcards as a base. Making learning with flashcards more fun and efficient.
I liked BillyGo's videos as a resource in the beginning. The apps I have on my phone to learn are Naver Dictionary, Anki and Migii. Didn't like any other apps I found.
It shines mainly if you have PDFs of the content you are learning from which to write flashcards. The best part for language learning is that, while doing reviews, you have some options to generate mnemonics and examples, it was super-helpful to me while learning Georgian!