Instead, it gives you full syllables and you’re supposed to just intuit that there’s a certain formula to building those syllables because they sure don’t let you know. From the beginning, there is no indication that Korean’s writing system, Hangul, is alphabetic. First of all, it uses romanization when it could very well just do a sound-symbol pairing… but I won’t waste space here complaining about why romanization is awful when I’ve already done that recently. I’m just going to take you with me step-by-step through the first few levels (I’m writing this review as I go through them, though I will likely add in little notes and edits when I do my final post clean-up) so you can see what problems cropped up.įrom the very starting stages, learning Hangul, it fails the learner. Korean Duo, unfortunately, is not quality material. I was expecting a similar outcome for the Korean Duo, but at the same time I really was hoping for the best because, while the amount of Korean learning resources available is increasing, there still just isn’t that much quality material out there.

I had played around with the Japanese Duo and found a few errors and oddities and just a lack of good information about the grammar, to the point that if I hadn’t already had a little background in the language, I probably would have given up far longer before I did. Have you ever had that feeling like you know you should feel disappointed but you just feel apathetic instead because you weren’t expecting enough to even be properly disappointed? That’s exactly how I feel about the Korean Duo. I know a lot of people love Duolingo and have great expectations and high hopes for the Korean Duo. Korean learners and would-be learners have been going a bit crazy about it ever since… pretty much ever since it was announced! If you happen to hang around the Korean subreddit on Reddit, you would know that posts hyping the Korean Duo come up fairly often. Once the course is given a final release, I will go back and do a new review. Anyway, even in light of this information I feel like my criticisms are still valid. I saw no indications of that on the app when I started the course, and I feel that many others will likely start the course not aware that it’s a beta. **NOTE** It was brought to my attention that this is a public beta release and the course still sin’t totally complete.

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