Korean vocabulary overview
LangOria's Korean course is currently built around practical sentence pairs from the Tatoeba corpus — a crowdsourced database of translations by native Korean speakers. The vocabulary is organised by CEFR level so you can see your progress against an internationally recognised scale. A1 covers survival Korean; A2 covers everyday conversation; B1 covers working Korean. Each entry pairs a Korean sentence with its English translation so you can read, listen, and shadow the natural rhythm of native Korean speech. The corpus is sampled across mainland South Korea, the diaspora in the US and Canada, and overseas communities in Japan and Australia, so you will hear a balanced mix of standard Seoul speech and lightly regional phrasing. We de-duplicate near-identical sentence pairs and prefer entries that include honorific verb endings (-습니다 / -세요) over the casual -(아/어)요 form, because the politeness register is what most adult learners need on day one. Each sentence is also audio-rendered through the Web Speech API with a ko-KR voice so you can hear the natural rising intonation of declarative questions and the falling tone of statements — the prosody carries as much meaning as the vocabulary itself. If a sentence contains a particle you have not learned yet, hover the highlighted token to see its function (topic, subject, object, location, instrument) without breaking your reading flow.
Korean vocabulary by level
Click any level to see the full list of words at that tier.
Why LangOria's Korean vocabulary works
Real example sentences
Every word comes with a real example from the Tatoeba corpus — no synthetic textbook filler.
Spaced repetition
Reviews are scheduled at the moment you are about to forget, so you retain more in less time.
45–65-minute daily loop
A short focused daily session beats a long abandoned one — streaks keep you honest.
Korean vocabulary FAQ
How is Korean vocabulary organised on LangOria?
By recognised ability levels — CEFR for most languages, JLPT for Japanese, HSK for Chinese and TOPIK for Korean. Each level groups the vocabulary you need at that stage, ordered by frequency and difficulty.
How many Korean words do I need per level?
It depends on the level and exam system: A1 covers roughly the 500 highest-frequency words and C2 the rarest academic and literary vocabulary; HSK 1 is 150 words and N5 around 800. Every deck pairs each word with a real example sentence from the Tatoeba corpus.
Where do the example sentences come from?
From Tatoeba, a community-built corpus of translations written by native speakers. Each example is designed for spaced-repetition review, so you meet words in the contexts native speakers actually use.
What is the best way to study Korean vocabulary?
The 45–65-minute daily spaced-repetition loop: review each word just as you are about to forget it. Pick the level that matches your goal — survival (A1), everyday conversation (A2-B1) or professional/fluent (B2-C1) — and move up one level at a time.