TTMIK Stories - Learn Korean

I had an issue with the audio not working but uninstalling and reinstalling the app seems to have fixed it. (Leaving that in the review because others may have the same issue) I do like the stories and they feel very level appropriate. Often with textbooks or graded readers the authors are a bit liberal in using non level appropriate words and just put a footnote but this really disrupts the flow for learners or at least it does for me. I haven’t worked through all the stories and I plan to update this review when I do. I got the annual subscription so I suppose if I fail to read all the stories in a year that in itself would be worth mentioning in the review. I would like to be able to copy and paste text however. I understand the creators are worried about plagiarism or maybe just people buying one month and then copying everything. But this limitation kind of stinks. I can’t use Chat GPT for help or make flash cards easily.

I love this app. This is a really fun and a progressive way to improve my reading skills and vocabulary. I too wish there was a translation to English after the quiz. Also, I love the idea of being able to review the vocabulary I learned, but I wish the feature was more interactive than just a quiz of the words. I struggle to remember words out of context and just in a big list. Last, I agree that it’s a bit too expensive.

After really benefitting from similar reading apps for learning Chinese and Japanese, I’d been looking around for ages for good graded reading material for Korean. I was delighted when I learned about the TTMIK Stories app and downloaded it immediately. The quality of text and recordings is very high, and I enjoyed doing a few stories/articles per day during the free trial period. However, when it came to reviewing new vocabulary from the stories I read, I was disappointed. Rather than offering a spaced repetition algorithm (which a lot of research suggests is the gold standard for moving vocab from short-term to long-term memory), the app has users review ALL chosen vocab during a review session. While users can manually remove a word from the review list when they feel they know it, it doesn’t seem to pop up again for long-term retention. Also, rather than asking how well you know the word upon revealing the answer, each flash card instead displays two English translations of the term and asks the user to pick the correct one. This was generally too easy and did not force me to actively recall in the way an Anki deck might. I’m really hoping the vocab review system gets an update, as that would probably convince me to subscribe.

Ok! This app only Damages you! And your Korean learning! First off: It needs more English! Second:Is it teaching you the right Korean sentence structure in these Korean story sentences? No! At least it teaches you some new words!🌟 And does it teach you Grammer Points! At least some?: No! At least knowing some grammer points are important and no one talks about them or teaches them! so annoying!!😞🤧 I had to dig all across YouTube to learn! (ANYWAYY!!) My third Complaint: The purchase! A lot/some of us are broke! And I feel like everything alot of things are a ridiculous purchase and it forces you! To me I think it’ll confuse you more in your Korean sentences which is important Memorizing Korean Sentences is very overwhelming to memorize..so I sometimes wish their was a Korean sentence app where you can play it and slowly get used to Korean Sentences! (Yea I’m gonna also venting about my stressful Korean learning) But good things: It makes you get used to the Korean pronunciation And teaches you new words in fun ways It makes you listen to Korean stories which is helpful It has a few complications but it’s a good app but I recommend to Not fully rely on it! Ok bye Pookies 😘👹✌🏽✌🏽

The content is some of the best audio and text leveled immersion out there. Professional voice actors reading is better than AI or even the usual TTMIK teacher voices. I would pay a few months at $5 a month, but $10 is too much for what this app offers. I’ll move on after one month. The app has a couple of issues I’m frustrated with. 1. It asks me to turn on notifications TWO times, EVERY time I open the app. I do not want notifications. I want to say no once, and my decision be respected. 2. A bug where it keeps saying that the next chapter is 6/10, when I’m already on 7, 8, or 9/10. So I have to exit the story and manually pick the chapter I’m actually supposed to be on. Thank you!

Overall, the app has an impressive number of stories that someone came up with with lots of vocabulary words to learn. That already shows a lot of work and thought that has gone into the korean material itself. My feedback is more on the application interface. Some things that can be improved: - Is there a place to submit feedback? Other than in the review? - Adding vocabulary feels tedious. I click on the word to see the definition, then I have to click another button to add it to my vocab list. I wouldn't have clicked on the word if I didn't want to add it to the list. But to add a vocab word takes 3 clicks then I can go back to sentence comprehension. But doing this up to 10 times per story feels like it could be smoother. - There's no feedback for answering questions for quizzes. I either get the question right or wrong, but I have no idea what I got right or wrong. Most of the time I don't know every word. That's to be expected when reading, but when taking the quiz, it's a lot of unexpected friction to look up vocab that I don't know and then figure out for myself why I got a question wrong. I can't make improvements if I don't know what I got wrong. If the question is a yes/no question, then change the statement so that it is true. There should be someway to know if I got the answer wrong because I didn't understand the question, or because I didn't understand the story. This is an UI/UX issue that I don't know the answer too, but users should learn something even when they get the answer wrong. - This is an extra since I know it requires even more material work but is there a way to add a translation of the story before trying to read/listen the korean story? Perhaps if a user wants to see it before they read the story but make it so that they can't go back to it or that a user can only see the korean story during the quizzes. You can take or leave this point though since it's more a pedagogy suggestion even though I am myself not a teacher, only a student.

I love the app, and especially enjoy the stories. I think being able to build a reading habit with a good interface, high quality voice acting, and an abundance of content is wonderful. Please, though, make one small change. Any reading app worth its salt has a dark theme. I find myself opening this app at night to read for a bit and immediately need to turn it off due to the brightness. Dark mode, please!

I like this app, just wish there was an option to look up words or at least what the full sentence meaning is. It is taking me a long time to go through every single word I know. For example, LingQ does this. It would benefit the absolute beginners and retain more people if you added this feature. Thanks!

I’ve been studying Korean since 2017. I started learning using TTMIK’s grammar podcast and got up to level 7 but I started having trouble remembering the grammar points I had learned because I didn’t have any good reading/listening material to reinforce what I learned. I wish I would have had this app back when I started studying Korean since it is a great resource to use in conjunction with the grammar podcast. The app has ten different levels which correspond with the ten levels of TTMIK’s grammar course. There is a placement test at the beginning which accurately placed me into level 7. Each level has Stories (broken up into 5 or 10 parts) and Articles (informational articles on random topics). In each story/article the more difficult words are in bold so I can click on them and see the definition of the word. If I don’t know the word, I can then add it to my vocab words to review later. The app also has recordings of each story that you can play as you read the story so you can hear the correct pronunciation. After doing the reading, there is a short quiz (three or four questions) to check your comprehension. I started with Level 7 and then completed Level 8 and started Level 9. However, Level 9 was too challenging for me and I was busy at the time so I decided to go back to Level 1 and start from the beginning. The stories in Level 1 seem kind of choppy but I’m amazed they managed to make stories with the limited grammar introduced in Level 1. I’ve been listening to five stories a day to improve my listening comprehension and I think it has been very beneficial. I’m now on Level 5 and have started studying with TTMIK’s grammar course again to review the grammar I learned before. I plan on going all the way through Level 10 of both the grammar course and the Stories app this time! I think that seeing how the grammar is used in context has given me a much better feel for what sounds natural in Korean. I love that the latest update includes an option to shuffle the order on the vocabulary quiz. Thanks TTMIK for making such a wonderful app!

Out of all the Korean story/reading lessons I’ve tried, this one was my favorite because it felt doable but also challenged me. The short quizzes at the end of each read was also useful. But it’s just too expensive. It costs around $16/mo.