Learning Korean - Talk to me in Korean!

When I talked about some of my favourite websites to get extra study material on Korean, I completely forgot about a recent but great find: Talk to me in Korean! It is, actually, good that it happened like that, because I think this one deserves to be featured alone.



Talk to me in Korean has weekly lessons that come out as podcasts on their website or via iTunes. They start at a very basic level and go up 'til Level 5 (so far), so almost all learners will find appropriate lessons. Besides having the regular video/audio podcasts, they also release every once in a while Iyagi lessons, which are "recordings of Korean conversations, at natural speed, about various topics". And that's not all! TTMIK also produces several other videos or audios with original content for you study times.

One great thing about it is that they have PDFs with each lesson's notes and worksheets for all lessons (but 1-10, Level 1), so you can also practice a bit after listening to the podcast. This is the best part for me, 'cause I'm one of those visual learners, so I need to have something to look at when studying.

But nothing's perfect, and I find that their putting the Korean word side-by-side with its romanization is a considerable drawback. It may be only me, but my eyes go straight to the letters I'm more used to read, instead of focusing on the Korean alphabet. This is manageable, though. I just used a black marker to "erase" all unwanted romanization. I reckon you'd be able to tweak the files if you have that Acrobat Professional (or something like it), but I just cannot say for sure.

All in all, it's quite good and it's been helpful to me, so I'd definitely recommend it!

Their last post is this fun video on popular exclamations. I love those kind of things and I hear "진짜요?" all the time on Korean TV shows, so it was nice learning how to write it properly and also learning a few more expressions. Take a look at the ones below and at the video I'm pasting here. And don't forget to check Talk to me in Korean and subscribe to their feeds!

"Here are some popular expressions used by Koreans when they are surprised or express exclamations.

1. 엄마야! = Oh My God! / Oops!
2. 대박 = Super cool! / Awesome!
3. 우와 = Wow
4. 진짜요? = For real?
5. 그래요? = Is that so?
6. 정말요? = Really?
7. 아이고! = *sigh* / Whew! / Oops!
8. 아싸 = Yay! / Hurrah!
9. 네? = Yes?
10. 어? = Huh?
11. 아/아야 = Ouch!
12. 헐 = What the…
13. 헉! = *gasp* / OMG!"

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIvZSdN3d8Y]


Check out more posts from this collaboration HERE.
Check out the other collaborators' blogs here.
Check out The Korea Blog!