Korean at A1: what actually works

The spaced-repetition workhorse. Mine sentences from your input, review them daily, the words stick. Ugly, free, and undefeated. (Costs money only on iOS.)

Audio-only, spaced-recall drills you can do hands-free. Great for building an early speaking reflex in the car while your ear catches up. Gets expensive; don't make it your whole plan.

The free, step-by-step roadmap for the immersion / input-first approach — exactly how to go from zero to fluent on comprehensible input. Read this before you spend a cent.

Real native speakers pronouncing any word, free. When the robot voice in your app sounds off, this is the human check. A tiny tool you'll use forever.

A huge free database of example sentences with audio across dozens of languages. Perfect for mining real sentence context for your Anki deck instead of memorizing naked words.

Free comprehensible-input Korean on YouTube, graded by level. Built for input-first learners — listen your way in before you force output. Rare and genuinely good.

The most complete free Korean resource going — lessons, stories, graded readers, audio. Not pure input, but the explanations are clear and the listening content is gold.

The same beginner story, told and retold with rising complexity, in dozens of languages — free. A perfect first reading + listening loop for any language.

Free comprehensible-input Korean on YouTube, graded by level. Built for input-first learners — listen your way in before you force output.

Fine for keeping a daily habit and a few hundred words. But the gamified tap-the-translation loop isn't comprehensible input — it builds streaks, not fluency. Use it as a warm-up, then go get real hours.

Streaks ≠ fluency — it's a habit toy, not real input.

The famous one. Picture-matching with zero context or culture, priced like a textbook. It won't hurt you — but your hours buy far more on free comprehensible input. Skip it.

Picture-matching, no real context. Expensive for what it is.

The native-speaker clip videos are genuinely nice. The rest is flashcard gamification you could do better (and free) in Anki. Mine the clips, skip the points.

Anki does the SRS part better and free.