Learn Korean to conversational in twelve months
A year at 40 minutes a day plus weekly tutor calls gets a determined English speaker to halting but real conversations and TOPIK I reading. Roughly 240 hours total. Hangul takes a weekend. The grammar takes the rest of the year.
12 months · ~240 hours · hold a 10-minute conversation, read short stories
1.Hangul — first, in one weekend
Korean's writing system is the easiest part of the language and the highest-leverage two hours you'll spend. King Sejong invented it in the 15th century specifically so peasants could learn to read in a day. Use TTMIK's free Hangul course or Lifeprint-style mnemonic charts on Saturday morning, drill the consonants and vowels Saturday afternoon, read children's words on Sunday. By Monday you should be reading every sign you see — slowly, but reading.
Free
TTMIK Hangul course →2.How to Study Korean — units 1 & 2
The single best free Korean grammar course on the internet, written by a self-taught learner who moved to Korea and now lives there. Each lesson comes with 20–30 vocabulary words, audio recordings, downloadable workbooks and quizzes. Work through Unit 1 in three months, Unit 2 by month ten. The explanations are blunt where TTMIK is polite — when 은/는 versus 이/가 still confuses you, this is the site that actually answers the question.
Free; optional workbook PDFs ~$10 each
How to Study Korean →3.italki — community tutor
Once you've learned the present-tense polite verb endings (around How to Study Korean lesson 9), book a community tutor for 30-minute conversation lessons twice a week. Korean community tutors run $10–18/hour. Tell yours you're a beginner, you'll bring the topic, and that they should hold you to formal-polite speech (해요체) — the level that's safe with strangers and your future in-laws. Same tutor every time.
~$10–18/hour, pay per lesson
italki Korean tutors →If this doesn't fit you
If you learn better from polished video courses than from text, replace How to Study Korean with TTMIK's paid curriculum on the courses.talktomeinkorean.com platform — nine levels, native-speaker hosts, and a more conversational tone. It costs around $14/month and is genuinely well-produced. The trade-off: less depth on the hard grammar points where How to Study Korean shines.
Why this path
Korean grammar is the wall — agglutinative, particle-heavy, and built around honorific levels that don't map to English. Apps like Duolingo never seriously teach this and learners stall after a year still translating sentence by sentence. How to Study Korean is the resource serious self-learners point each other to because the explanations are honest about what's hard and don't soften the grammar to keep you swiping. Hangul on day one, grammar at home, mouth time on italki — that's the whole game.