A while back I made a post on r/languagelearning reddit asking for a review of the Memrise Officials courses when they first came out. There was some good feedback for a lot of courses, but there was also some bad feedback for some, notably the Korean course. There is not a lot of good resources for learning Korean and I am very happy Memrise created a course for Korean, but the quality of the current Korean course was put into question:
Here is the original post:
I don’t know a whole bunch about Korean language, but the person reviewing the Korean course had a pretty negative view upon it. And I was wondering if the Korean course will ever be revised to be more accurate, to address any issues pointed out, or if it will remain the same and (Seemingly) flawed until the end of time?
I agree with that review, it is certainly not the best way to start learning Korean. I already raised the 당신 issue in an earlier message somewhere. Maybe on the now-gone course forum, can’t remember.
It is rather surprising as, from what I’ve heard, these course were reviewed by native speakers.
Don’t know about future plans on maintenance or update of these official courses.
I’ll add the TTIK memrise course they mention to the resource list here. It looks like a great grammar alternative, indeed.
I agree.
Most of the corean courses here are very bad, like the Korean number course which would be a good idea but they switch numbers between sino-corean and native corean randomly and you have to ignore half the words cause they’re empty. The Korean Time course would be good, but it is kinda of broken at the moment so I cannot learn new words there anymore, only review the old ones I learned.
All TTMIK courses are really well made. I’ve been following their website and they have a lot of material there also.
The 500 basic corean verbs course is also quite good but it is pretty tough and it puts the verbs alphabetically, which might be good for consultation later, I suppose, but at the moment is driving me crazy cause it is much more difficult to learn many words that are so similar at the same time without getting confused.
I agree, I just started the official memrise Korean course 4 (I had studied a little Korean already in university so picked a level a bit at random) and am surprised at all the inaccuracies. As Nigu84 mentioned, it’s pretty bad that they teach 당신 as “you”, which would considered quite rude in Korea. The sentences they provide also require you to use the pronouns (I, you, he/she, etc) all the time, which is not how Korean works. I’ve seen a few other inaccuracies too in regards to grammar structures. It’s been helpful for vocab but only if you’re already at a level of Korean where you can recognize mistakes (and there could be more I’m missing cause I’m still at a fairly low beginner-intermediate level!). I wish there were a way to flag issues in the lessons themselves, similar to a Duolingo model.