한국어
Lingo7 lets you read books with a translation under every sentence in 49 languages. Korean is not one of them yet. Ask for it below, and see what adding it takes and what reading Korean involves.
Lingo7 does not read Korean yet: the app has no Korean dictionary, audio or books, and Korean words need splitting from their particles before a tap can translate them. Readers ask for Japanese, Korean and Chinese most often. Leave your email to vote; we add the most requested languages first and write to you once, when Korean is ready.
We add the most requested languages first. Leave your email and we'll write to you once, when Korean is ready.
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The demo below is the live reader with a German book. Korean would work the same way once it is added.
Spoken in: South Korea, North Korea; large communities in the United States, China and Japan
Hangul is an alphabet, but its letters are not written in a row. Each syllable is packed into a square block: a first consonant, a vowel, and sometimes a final consonant underneath, arranged left to right and top to bottom. After a few weeks a reader sees 한 as h-a-n at a glance, and the script stops being the obstacle.
The spelling keeps the root of each word intact, so letters do not always sound the way they look. 한국말 (the Korean language) is written hanguk-mal but said hangung-mal, and 종로 (a district of Seoul) is said jong-no. A handful of regular sound-change rules cover most of these cases, which is why reading along with audio helps so much at the start.
Courses start with the polite -요 style of speech, but books, newspapers and magazines are written in the plain style, with sentences that end in -다 (했다, 간다). Dialogue inside a novel switches back to spoken styles, so one page can mix two speech levels. Beginners usually read picture books, graded readers and webtoons before moving on to web novels and news.
There is no date yet. We add the most requested languages first, and Korean needs the work described on this page. Leave your email in the form and we will write to you once, when Korean is ready.
Not yet. Lingo7 has no Korean dictionary, audio or shelf of books, so a Korean book would not get the sentence-by-sentence translation and word lookups the app is built on. The 49 languages it does read are listed on the home page.
One vote per email address per language. The count on this page shows a number once at least 10 people have asked, and refreshes within a minute of a new vote. Your email is stored only to tell you when Korean launches, and deleted whenever you ask at support@lingoseven.com.
Written Korean has its own speech level. The plain style, ending in -다, is used in books, newspapers and magazines, while -요 is the polite spoken style that courses and phrasebooks teach first. The verbs are the same underneath, so after a few weeks of reading the two sets of endings stop feeling like different languages.
Hangul spelling keeps the underlying form of each word, and sounds then change where syllables meet: 한국말 is pronounced hangung-mal, not hanguk-mal. The rules are regular and few, so learners absorb them by reading aloud with audio rather than memorizing exceptions.
Yes, with some adjustment. The alphabet and grammar are the same. The North keeps an initial ㄹ or ㄴ in Sino-Korean words that the South drops (녀자 for 여자, woman), writes more compounds as one word, and avoids the English loanwords that are common in the South.