LingoDeer, Duolingo, Drops and Memrise compared — hangul in days, grammar that works backwards to English, native-speaker clips and vocabulary in script.
Korean is less intimidating than its reputation, for one specific reason: hangul was designed to be easy and most people can read it after a couple of days. The cost comes afterward, from a grammar that organises sentences the opposite way to English and politeness levels that change every utterance, which is where general-purpose apps go shallow. The 4 apps in this guide cover the alphabet and daily habit, the grammar in real depth, vocabulary and the ear.
LingoDeer is the Asian-languages specialist, explaining Korean grammar at a depth no generalist reaches.
LingoDeer is built specifically for Korean, Japanese and Chinese by native teachers, with proper grammar explanations, character and alphabet work, native audio and a strict level-by-level structure, which is exactly what Korean's sentence order and particles require. It is the right anchor for serious beginners. Full access is subscription-based, it is less gamified than Duolingo, and its language catalogue is deliberately small.
Duolingo teaches hangul from the first unit and is the cheapest way to build the habit, with little grammar depth.
Duolingo introduces the alphabet from the first unit and wraps it in the familiar five-minute lessons, streaks and rewards, making it the easiest free way to start and to keep studying daily. For Korean specifically it explains little about why structures work, so it teaches recognition and momentum rather than the grammar, with ads in the free version and paid ad-free Super.
Drops drills Korean words through illustrations in hangul itself, reinforcing the alphabet instead of romanisation.
Drops does one job in five-minute daily games: vocabulary, presented with illustrations and drag-to-match interactions, and for Korean it keeps words in hangul rather than only in transliteration, which trains reading from the first session. It deliberately teaches no grammar or sentence building, the free plan caps use at five minutes a day, and it cannot serve as a standalone method.
Memrise plays short clips of real Koreans speaking at natural speed, for the spoken language rather than the textbook one.
Memrise teaches through videos of genuine native speakers with a spaced-repetition system underneath, so you hear the language as people actually use it, including speed and informal endings, and vocabulary sticks with less effort. It is the strongest tool here for listening and everyday words, but full access is subscription-only, grammar is less structured than in LingoDeer, and the focus stays on vocabulary over writing.
Pros
Clips of real Korean speakers
Spaced repetition for recall
Natural-speed, authentic speech
Cons
Full access needs a subscription
Less grammar structure than LingoDeer
Weighted toward vocabulary
Download price only. In-app purchases and subscriptions may cost extra.
Questions & answers
How long does it take to learn hangul?
Very little: most people read hangul comfortably after two or three days of practice. It was designed in the 15th century specifically to be easy to learn, with letter shapes that mimic the position of the mouth for each sound. Learning it first matters because studying Korean romanised in the Latin alphabet slows everything else down.
Why is Korean grammar considered hard?
Because the sentence order is subject, object and verb at the end, with particles marking the role of each word, none of which exists in English, and on top of that come formality levels: the same sentence changes depending on who you are talking to. LingoDeer explains this layer explicitly; Duolingo barely touches it, which is its main weakness in Korean.
Do K-pop and dramas actually help you learn?
As a complement, a lot: they train your ear and expose you to the colloquial register, which is precisely what structured drills lack. The caveat is that drama language tends to be informal and is not always appropriate with strangers or at work. Treat both as reinforcement around a course rather than a method on their own.
How long does it take to learn Korean?
It sits in the hardest group of languages for English speakers, alongside Japanese, Chinese and Arabic, and the institutes that train diplomats estimate more than two thousand hours for a professional level. To get by on a trip or understand the basics of a conversation, a few months of consistent practice with these apps is enough to notice real progress.
More related apps
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