The best AI apps to practice speaking Korean

What you need to practice speaking Korean

Korean takes work. In our ranking of 67 languages it’s the 5th hardest for English speakers, at 7,870 effort points. That’s more than two and a half times what Spanish takes (2,941), and more than Thai (6,184), though less than Mandarin or Japanese.

The alphabet is the quick part: you can learn to read Hangul in a few days. The hard part is everything after. Apart from loanwords like 커피, coffee, almost no word looks like anything you know, and the grammar works differently.

• Hangul, and how it really soundsHangul is quick to learn: 24 basic letters, stacked into syllable blocks. 한 is ㅎ, ㅏ and ㄴ: h, a, n. But letters change their sound next to each other. 감사합니다, thank you, is said gamsahamnida, with an m where the ㅂ is written. You learn that by hearing it, over and over.
• Speech levelsEvery Korean sentence ends in a way that shows how polite you’re being. Thank you is 고마워 to a friend, 고마워요 to most people, and 감사합니다 in a shop or at work. Drop the 요 with someone you just met, and you sound rude. You want those slips fixed while you talk.
• Particles, and the verb at the endLittle endings say who does what. 저는 커피를 마셔요, I drink coffee, is literally “I (topic) coffee (object) drink”. The verb always comes last, and the particle changes with the word before it: 책을, the book, but 사과를, the apple. Knowing the table is one thing. Getting it right while you talk takes practice.
• Three kinds of g, d and bKorean has sounds English doesn’t tell apart: plain, breathy and tense. 달 (dal) is the moon, 탈 (tal) a mask, 딸 (ttal) a daughter. The quickest fix: say your sentence, then hear a native speaker say the same one.
• Lots of Korean you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words come from input: videos, podcasts and texts where you already understand most of it.
• Lots of speaking timeA language this hard takes hours of talking. A few minutes a day won’t get you there.

A complete fluency system, not just a speaking app

Our speaking practice is the heart of Teacher AI. But speaking alone won’t make you fluent, and neither will input alone. You need both, and you need to see it working. With Korean that matters even more: almost every word is new to you, so you need to meet each one many times.

So Teacher AI is a complete fluency system. Input grows your Korean. Speaking activates it. And we track every word along the way, to get you to real fluency as fast as we can.

1. Step 1Input grows your vocabularyWatch Korean YouTube videos and podcasts, and read stories written at your level. You always see how much you already understand, and every word you tap becomes a flashcard. How Watch and Read work.
2. Step 2Speaking activates itRecognizing a word isn’t the same as saying it, with the right particle and the right ending, without thinking. Talking with your teacher, for as long as you like, is how words move from “I know that one” to “I just said it”. Every mistake gets fixed, with a Why?.
3. Step 3We track every wordYour passive words are the ones you understand when you read or hear them. Your active words are the ones you’ve used yourself. You see both grow, how your time splits between input and output, and how many words to your next level.

Brand new to Korean? Start somewhere else first. Teacher AI works best from about A2, once you can handle simple everyday sentences. Before that, you just don’t have enough words yet for open conversation. So learn Hangul and the basics with Duolingo, Speak or Pimsleur, which all teach Korean from zero, and come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in Korean

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. You answer, your teacher replies, and if you made a mistake, your sentence gets fixed right there.

A card for every word you tap

Tap any word, in a conversation, a video or a story, and you get its card: what it means, what kind of word it is, and an example with a translation. Tap play to hear it.

An illustration of three word cards, rebuilt for this page. On the real card, the wording depends on the word. Below: real screenshots of the web app.

Meet your Korean teachers

Four teachers: Hye-Jin from Busan, Seok-jin and Yuna from Seoul, and Xiaoma from New York, the YouTuber behind Xiaomanyc and one of our co-founders. Pick the one you like.

• 
  Hye-Jin Park

  Busan · South Korean
• 
  Seok-jin Han

  Seoul · South Korean
• 
  Xiaoma

  New York City · American

  Xiaomanyc
• 
  Yuna Lee

  Seoul · South Korean

Input: Korean to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words come from lots of Korean you hear and read, where you already understand most of it.

Watch and Read are on the web app for now. Words you read along with, without tapping, count toward your passive words. Every word you tap lands in your flashcards. And when you’re done, you talk about it with your teacher.

• Any YouTube videoPaste a link to a Korean YouTube video, or an Apple Podcasts episode. We turn it into a page you read along with, new words in yellow. No subtitles? On a paid plan we transcribe it for you, within a monthly allowance.
• Stories written for youRead writes Korean texts at your level, from A1 to Native, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every Korean word you’ve met: the ones you use when you talk, the ones you read or hear, the ones you tap. It checks every word of a video or text against that list and shows you the share you already know.
• The 80% rulePick videos and texts where you know 80% or more of the words. Then your brain fills in the rest from context. Under 70% is too much for now. 90% and up is easy and fun.
• Then talk about itOne tap on Talk about this starts a conversation about what you just watched or read. Retelling it is how new words become words you can say.

Teacher AI or Duolingo?

Lots of people start Korean on Duolingo: 12 million learners, it says. Good! So here’s how the two compare for speaking, with every Duolingo fact from Duolingo’s own pages.

The apps side by side

The apps, one by one

Where another app might suit you better

Head-to-head comparisons

Teacher AI vs Speak · Teacher AI vs Langua · Teacher AI vs Talkpal · Teacher AI vs Praktika · Teacher AI vs Duolingo. All comparisons.

Other languages

SpanishSpain and Latin AmericaFrenchFrance, Belgium and SwitzerlandMandarin ChineseSimplified or Traditional, with pinyinCantoneseHong Kong, with JyutpingThaiWith spaces between words, and Paiboon+ or IPAJapaneseWith furigana or romaji, and a kanji countDutchThe Netherlands and Flanders, with Flemish voicesBrazilian PortugueseWith Brazilian teachers and well-known polyglotsItalianWith Italian teachers from Podcast Italiano and Vaporetto ItalianoGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoEnglishWith American and British teachers, from Espresso English to English Like A NativeRussianWith the stress marked above every wordTurkishWith Can from Turkishle, and every ending fixed as you talkArabicWith teachers from Cairo, Amman and Jeddah, and a straight answer on MSA or dialectPolishWith teachers from Warsaw, and every case ending fixedSwedishPitch accent, en or ett, and nobody switching to EnglishIndonesianWith teachers from Bali and Bandung, for the Indonesian people actually speakHindiWith teachers from Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, and every missing ने fixedRomanianWith teachers from Bucharest and Transylvania, and every ending explainedCatalanFor when Barcelona keeps answering you in SpanishVietnameseWith teachers from Hanoi and Sapa, and every tone, classifier and pronoun fixedUkrainianWith two teachers from Lviv, and every case fixed as you talkGreekWith teachers from Crete and Thessaloniki, and every gender and ending explainedHebrewFor Hebrew without the vowels, with two teachers from Tel AvivCzechWith Klara and Lukáš from Brno, and a Why? on every case ending