Korean has a reputation as one of the hardest languages an English speaker can pick, and on most measures it earns it. The vocabulary shares almost nothing with English. The verb goes at the end of the sentence. Every sentence you say carries a decision about how polite to be.
And yet the first step is easier than in almost any other language: the writing system. If you are starting Korean, learn Hangul before you learn a single phrase. Here is why, and what the next few weeks look like after that.
Hangul was designed to be learned
Most writing systems grew; Hangul was built. It was created under King Sejong and promulgated in 1446, with the explicit aim that ordinary people could learn to read. That shows in how it works.
It is an alphabet, not a set of characters. There are 24 basic letters - 14 consonants and 10 vowels - plus doubled consonants and combined vowels that are built from them. Compare that with the thousands of characters a Chinese or Japanese learner has to meet.
The shapes are not arbitrary. The basic consonants were drawn to suggest the position of the mouth when you say them: ㄱ is the back of the tongue raised, ㄴ the tip of the tongue against the ridge behind the teeth, ㅁ the closed mouth. The letters that share a place in the mouth share a shape, with a stroke added for a stronger sound (ㄱ, then ㅋ). Once you see the pattern, you are learning a system rather than memorising a list.
Letters stack into syllable blocks. 한 is ㅎ + ㅏ + ㄴ, arranged in a square. Every block starts with a consonant (ㅇ stands in, silently, when the syllable starts with a vowel), then a vowel, then optionally a final consonant. The blocks look intimidating for about a day, then they become the reason Korean text is quick to scan.
Why not just use romanization?
Because it teaches you the wrong sounds. Korean distinguishes three versions of several consonants - plain, aspirated and tense: ㄱ, ㅋ and ㄲ; ㄷ, ㅌ and ㄸ; ㅂ, ㅍ and ㅃ. English does not make that three-way contrast, and so the Latin alphabet has no good way to write it. Romanization systems paper over the difference with letter choices that look familiar and quietly point your mouth at an English sound.
The deeper problem is time. Every week you read Korean through romanization is a week you are not practising the reading you will need anyway, and the habit is hard to drop. Real Korean - signs, menus, messages, subtitles - is not romanized.
A realistic target: a few days of short sessions to read slowly, a couple of weeks to read without sounding every block out. Speed comes from use, not from more alphabet drilling, so move on as soon as you can decode.
What comes straight after the alphabet
Three things will feel strange in your first month. None is hard once someone names it.
The verb goes last. Korean is subject-object-verb: "I coffee drink". You learn to hold the sentence open until the end, which is also where the tense and the politeness live. Our grammar notes on word order cover it with examples.
Particles tell you who did what. Instead of word order, small endings mark each noun's role: 은/는 for the topic, 이/가 for the subject, 을/를 for the object. The topic/subject distinction is the one learners argue about for years; start with the three particle pairs and let the finer points come from reading.
Politeness is grammar, not tone. The ending on the verb changes with who you are talking to. The polite -요 form is the right default for almost every conversation a learner will have with an adult they do not know well - see speech levels. What does not change is the person: Korean verbs have no separate form for "I", "you" and "she", which is one less table to learn. (We wrote about that in Not every language conjugates like Spanish.)
One more you will meet in week one: Korean has two number systems - a native Korean set and a set borrowed from Chinese - and which one you use depends on what you are counting. Telling the time uses both at once.
How Semantix teaches Korean
Honestly, and so you can plan around it:
- We do not teach the alphabet itself. The Korean course starts at
greetings and introductions, written in Hangul, with English glosses. There is no romanized track. That is the reason for the advice above: spend your first few days on Hangul with any alphabet chart or app, then start.
- Every lesson is in real Korean script, with a grammar note in plain
English before the drills that practise it.
- The tutor speaks Korean aloud. Korean has a neural text-to-speech voice,
so you can hear every reply and every card, which matters more for Korean than for most languages because of those consonant contrasts. Speaking practice uses your browser's speech recognition, so whether it works depends on the browser you are using.
- The course runs from A1 to C1 - 18 units, with a checkpoint at the end of
each. You can see what each band covers on the Korean A1 page and move up from there.
The honest summary
Korean is a long road for an English speaker, and nobody serious will tell you otherwise. But the first mile is short: an alphabet that was designed to be learned, in days rather than months. Learn it first, skip the romanization, and you start the real work reading the language the way Koreans write it.
When you can sound out 안녕하세요 without help, you are ready. Start the Korean course or try a conversation first.