Thanks for sharing! (Should probably use this thread more…
)
I downloaded the app to try it out - TTMIK stuff is always high-quality, and this is no different. It’s similar to Satori Reader for Japanese, as it’s a large selection of graded stories and articles (though it aligns with their own levels rather than TOPIK). When you open the app, you take a placement test so you start at the appropriate level.
Stories are in multiple parts (lower levels have 5-part stories, higher levels have 10-part stories), whereas articles are standalone. Each story/article includes:
- a short text with accompanying native audio (each sentence highlighted as it is read)
- comprehension quiz
- sentence-by-sentence English translations
- grammar and vocabulary breakdowns for every sentence
- questions for you to practice writing in korean (although this section has a button with ‘AI beta’, not sure if AI generated the questions or checks your writing)
After you mark a story/article as finished, it’s added to a review playlist where you can read the text and listen to the audio for individual lessons one after another. There’s also a flashcard feature, so you can add words from the lessons to review (presumably this is spaced repetition).
There is one major thing that bugs me, though: although you can easily select different levels to study, you can’t choose whatever lessons you want, you have to work through them in order and mark the current lesson finished before you can proceed to the next. So you can’t skip stories/articles you aren’t interested in, you have to mark them as finished before you can move on; perhaps understandable for a multi-part story, but less so for if you want to skip a whole story and move onto the next one, and not at all useful for articles IMO. I think this could be demotivating for learners, as your options are to force yourself to work through multi-part stories you don’t enjoy, or mark the lessons as finished without doing them (but they’ll still appear in your review playlist).
There are some other minor things: the level selection dropdown is slightly too narrow so you can’t see the level numbers (on my device, at least), and I’m guessing you have to complete every lesson on the current level before your profile reflects that you’ve moved up a level (when you don’t seem to be able to skip, and you might feel ready to move on before finishing all the stories/articles). I also can’t find any pricing info (perhaps because it’s a special event), which makes it difficult to comment on whether it would be worth the cost.
One other thing I noticed is that the amount of content available varies by level: the mid-levels have up to ten 10-part stories (100 lessons) plus perhaps the same number of articles, while both the beginner and advanced levels have much fewer. There’s not much difference in the length of the texts at different levels, either… But perhaps they’re still adding content.
I think this would probably benefit people who are already following TTMIK’s language course since the levels correspond and it gives you more material to consolidate what you’ve learned. If you’re following a different textbook course, the vocab and grammar might not quite align, but it would still be useful if you want extra reading/listening material.
I know this isn’t where the money is, but I really wish they’d make content to bridge the gap between learner and native materials. Their own course goes up to Level 10, which is really only TOPIK 3 (maybe 4 at a push), so you need to migrate to a university textbook anyway if you want more advanced grammar and reading material.
I feel like the existence of Natively helps with finding books that should be manageable at your level, but I still feel like it would be enormously beneficial if there were more high-level graded readers to help ease learners into narrative fiction, as there’s a clear difference from textbook passages which tend to be non-fiction and academic.
TL;DR Good reading practice for beginners to low-intermediate, if you think it’s worth the price.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. 
. So definitely a lot more to go, but I’m sure I’ll learn a lot of vocab along the way
But there only seems to be 2 volumes so far? I want more!
) though low-intermediate and then pat you on the back like, ok kid, you’ve got this from here. Got what? I don’t understand anything outside of a graded reader 
. KimchiReader is the only non japanese rating system i’ve found.. outside of Natively.
I’m not active in other language-learning communities (I just loot their resources 
), so I’m coming from the perspective of “if someone were self-studying Korean and wanted to read their first novel, what would they find on google?”
