You should be able to make simple sentences and express your feelings and ideas at this stage. You will need to start familiarizingyour mind with thinking in Korean and forming Korean sentences.
HelloTalk app
One highly recommended app to practise amateur writing is HelloTalk. It brings together a network of language learners helping each other. While you can get help with your Korean from natives, you can also help other people learn your native language.
When you first create an account in HelloTalk, you will be asked to select your native language and the language you are interested to learn. The free version only let you choose one of each while the paid version let you choose multiple languages. Your HelloTalk experience will then be tailored to these settings. Be careful that once you choose your native language you will not be able to change it later on.
The HelloTalk app
Among language exchange apps HelloTalk is the one I hear the best reviews about and I also personally use.
Chat with native Koreans
Chat with native Koreans who are interested in learning your language so you can both improve at the same time.
Have your post corrected
Tag your post with ‘Please correct me’ or ‘수정해 주세요’ and other helpful members will correct your Korean!
The most useful functions are posts and private chats. You can read what other people post in Korean and write your own post similar to Facebook or Instagram. The great thing is that other users will help correct your post written in Korean. You can also ask specific questions you come across during your study.
The same also applies for private chats. Say if you speak English natively and want to learn Korean, the app will suggest to you a list of users who speaks Korean natively and want to learn English. You can initiate conversations with any of them and sometimes you will also receive messages from you since you don’t know. In your private chat, you can easily correct each other’s messages (like the mark up function in MS Word). This should give you ample chance to start practising your written Korean.
If you want to make the most out of HelloTalk or any other language exchange app, pay attention to the below Do’s and Don’ts.
Be polite
Always use the polite form of Korean (존댓말 or 높임말) i.e. ending in 요 or ㅂ니다. Koreans take this very seriously and would be offended if you use the informal form of speech (반말). Apart from form of speech, be humble and polite in your attitude as well.
Beware of scams
Apply the same prudence as you would meeting a complete stranger in any other occasion. There have been reported cases of money and sexual scams in HelloTalk. However if you use it with caution it can still be a very powerful language learning tool.
Choosing your native language
It will be more advantageous if your native language is popular among Korean language learners as you will have a bigger community to interact with and learn from. Therefore do not choose a dialect; If you are equally fluent in two languages, choose the more popular one.
Our good friend - Naver dictionary
Not only useful to check definitions, with its abundant examples, it is also useful when you write
When you want to say something in Korean but not sure how to do it, you can break it down into smaller phrases and input the English expression into Naver dictionary. Select ‘Example’. Depending on how commonly used is the expression, you will find a lot of examples how to express that in Korean.
For example if I search for ‘anything can happen’, I can see examples of ‘어떤일도 일어날 수 있다’, ‘무슨 일이든지 일어날 수 있다’ or ‘모든 일이 다 생길 수 있다’ etc. So I know all these are correct and natural ways of conveying this meaning.
Learning techniques
You should be able to make simple sentences and express your feelings and ideas at this stage. I would suggest to make it a habit to write a few lines in Korean in HelloTalk or in your diary. Talk about what you did, what happened to you and how you feel on that day. Familiarize your mind with thinking in Korean and forming Korean sentences.
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