I am not using much Korean here on Lingq but I have actually taken Korean as a class and followed the sounds and read the Hangul and I will say that I absolutely HATE transliteration. It’s not consistent as someone said above, at least to how I would even interpret something properly transliterated.
Case in point, two artists names, Lee Hyun Do and Uhm Jung Hwa. This spelling is common but not correct at all to me, if you want to be phoenetically accurate to how I had learned to associate the sounds it’s Lee Hyeon Do and Eom Jeong Hwa. Those are VERY different so when I suddenly saw how their names were actually spelled I was really pissed as I put in different Hangul for search results.
Japanese is much easier because a lot of those sounds already in English so there are close approximations. This doesn’t work though in Chinese and Korean.
Along these lines Roku needs NON English text support when you are searching for Korean and Chinese movies and actors and actresses.
I already discussed it here, but stemming seems to be at least partly solved in programming, yet we get many duplicated words that should not be duplicated. I understand creating a separate word for different verb endings, but particles always act the same way.
Devs, please do something about this so you can take my money.
Fantastic post - can’t believe I came so late to this thread. I very much agree with #4 and #5 here.
As for #2 though, I think it’s sort of an 어쩔 수 없다 situation 
Naver is by far the best English-Korean dictionary available online, but any bilingual dictionary can’t/won’t contain every word (especially when we’re dealing with rarer homophonic hanja vocabulary, etc…) I think that the current resources on LingQ are probably the best they can do, and more advanced learners who have trouble finding a term in the standard Naver English dictionary should just take up the challenge and start trying to read/understand the native Naver dictionary (or other good resources like 우리말샘, or whatever.)
Resurrecting this thread to say that it would be nice if you could introduce Korean fonts to the web reader. Not a critical improvement, but still it would be a nice addition to have.
Also, a wider range of TTS voices would not go amiss. There are only three currently and the two female voices are quite robotic. The only natural sounding voice at the moment is male.
@TerraEarth
It’s been a while since your post but regarding hiding the progress bar:
Is there any chance you could share with us how you managed to hide it? I wholeheartly agree with you that when reading longer (especially difficult) texts that this is a huge distractor and demotivator.
Thanks in advance.
Hello.
My name is Tatiana, I don’t know where it is better to ask my questions, perhaps here.
I was told the LingQ is one of the best apps to read books. My target language is Korean. But now I am really frustrated since I can’t find any decent books in Korean here. There a lot of podcasts and textbooks, very good though but not real books.
Could you tell what the problem can be?
- I use a trial thing, maybe there are restrictions? I’d love to but a subscription but I have to know there are books here.
- I am terrible in searching?
- There are no real and famous books in Korean? Currently I am reading Harry Potter in paper so I thought it would be possible to find the book here
Thank you
You will only find a limited number of books in the Lingq library because of copyright reasons. I read a lot of books in Korean, but I purchase them from Google Play, remove the DRM using Epubor and then I import them into Lingq privately to read them.
The problem is copyright. Legally we can’t share books here. However you are able to purchase your own ebook elsewhere, upload onto to LingQ as ‘private’ and read it. There are other threads here that will give you some guidelines on how to do that. It’s a pain.
For some languages it’s possible to find good reading materials free of copyright. But for Korean it’s almost impossible. Several reasons for this. One of the biggest is how much South Korea has changed in the last 50 to 100 years. Changes in both culture and language. Trying to read books from 100 years ago (free of copyright issues) as a second language learner is a waste of time unless you’re VERY advanced.
Actually, there’s almost no book written in Korean in 100 years ago. They used Chinese character.
I think the key-problem is the K-galapagos. In Korean, Ebook platforms use their own DRM and it’s impossible to crack them.
Few years ago. I could transform DRMed books from Google books to text, word, and epub file. Look around google books whether there’s interesting books. As far as I know, it’s the only way to get a DRM-free books in Korean.
Korean as in language? No, that’s incorrect. But if you mean by “Korean” the alphabet Hangul, then okay.
Whether a language is written only with an alphabet, or with just Chinese characters, or a mix of both, it’s still Korean. e.g. Chinese characters used in the Japanese writing system doesn’t make Japanese language books less Japanese.
LingQ is essentially just a tool, and the subscription fee is simply the cost of using that tool.
As for the content, they mostly gather freely available material that you could access even without using LingQ.
That said, I do feel it’s a bit inconvenient that importing content you’ve purchased yourself is such a hassle.
Personally, I buy books with audio, use LingQ’s automatic transcript feature, and then manually correct the errors by comparing it with the original text.
In Japan, where I live, it’s illegal to remove DRM, even for personal use.
However, audio that comes with books sold in Japan usually doesn’t have any DRM protection.