Who this course is for

• Intermediate and advanced learners, especially anyone working on TOPIK II reading and vocabulary.
• Learners who feel their vocabulary has stopped growing however many lists they study.
• Anyone who meets unknown words in exam passages and has no way to guess.

About this course

A large share of Korean vocabulary is built from Sino-Korean roots, and those roots repeat. Learn the root 학 (study) and you have a handle on 학교, 학생, 학기, 입학, 방학 and many more. That is the idea this course is built on: stop learning words one at a time and start learning the pieces they are made of.

You never write a Chinese character. The course is recognition only. A root is a sound, a meaning and a visual anchor, and you can do every drill knowing only that “학 means study”, and never look at the character again. The characters are shown large and clearly because seeing them helps memory, but nothing depends on reproducing them.

After an introduction to the method, the roots are taught by theme: people and life, society and institutions, action and change, and description and position. Each root arrives with a family of real, current, exam-relevant words, beginning with a word you almost certainly already know so that the sound and meaning have something to attach to.

One sound in Korean often maps to several different roots, and pretending otherwise produces confident wrong guesses. Every lesson has a “Same Sound, Different Root” part that names the collisions its roots are involved in, so you learn the boundaries at the same time as the rule.

The skill the course actually trains is guessing. Every root lesson ends with a “Guess the New Word” drill using words the lesson never taught, and the final exam is built around items you have not seen. The course also teaches the limits of the method honestly: root decoding gives you a probable meaning to confirm against the sentence, not a guarantee.

The last section covers the most useful prefixes and suffixes, reading news-style headlines with the characters Korean media still use, such as 美, 中 and 韓, and a 150-root final exam with an optional timer. A printable chart of all 152 roots comes with the course.

What you’ll get

• About 150 high-frequency Sino-Korean roots, taught by theme
• Recognition only: you never have to write a Chinese character
• One root unlocks a whole word family, built from verified, exam-relevant words
• “Same sound, different root” lessons that prevent confident wrong guesses
• “Guess the new word” drills using words the lesson never taught
• Headline reading practice with the characters used in Korean news, such as 美, 中 and 韓
• A final exam with an optional timer, and a printable chart of all 152 roots

Course curriculum

24 lessons in 6 sections

Questions about this course