What writing system does Korean use?

Hangul (한글; 조선글 in North Korea), an alphabet of 24 basic letters grouped into syllable blocks and written left to right. Chinese characters (한자) still appear occasionally in South Korea; Stichos writes Hangul only.

Is Stichos suitable for complete beginners with zero prior knowledge (A0)?

Yes. A0 is a primary focus, designed for readers with no prior knowledge. A1 then adds basic everyday vocabulary and simple connected clauses as your foundation grows.

Are Stichos levels the same as CEFR levels?

Not exactly. Stichos levels use the familiar CEFR names, from A0 to B2, and are modelled on the CEFR (the Common European Framework of Reference), so a Stichos B1 is meant to feel close to a B1 in your course book. They aren't an official CEFR rating, and different books and exams draw the lines in slightly different places. A0 is Stichos's own addition, just below the framework's first level.

Are the stories written by AI, and how accurate are they?

Yes. Stories are generated by AI and then checked by further automated steps against the grammar and vocabulary rules for your level. That catches most problems, but it isn't a human editor, so an occasional unnatural phrase or slip can get through. Treat Stichos as practice material, and check anything you're unsure of with a teacher or a reference.

Can I read stories with explanations in my native language?

Yes. Stichos allows you to pair any target language with any native support language. You can read a Croatian story with French glosses, or a German story with Spanish explanations.

How does word lookup work while reading?

Tap or click any word for its meaning in that sentence, explained in your own language. In the full version, you can save any word to your Vocab Bank for later review.

Is the preview free, and what happens to my email?

Yes. The preview is free and needs no account. If you join the Reading List, we use your email to send your 3 free sample stories (PDF, after you confirm your address) and to let you know when we fully open. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it.

Do stories include audio or narration?

Story narration isn't part of the preview. At launch, the Premium Audio add-on reads every story aloud in a natural-sounding AI voice, in 39 of our 40 languages (Esperanto doesn't have audio support yet).

Read Beginner Korean Stories with AI

Try a free A1 Korean passage generated live with interactive translations.

Generates beginner Korean stories live with tap-to-translate vocabulary and line-by-line English translations.

마리나 씨의 에어컨

오늘 날씨가 아주 더웠어요.

The weather was very hot today.

집이 정말 더웠어요.

The house was really hot.

에어컨이 고장 났어요.

The air conditioner broke down.

마리나 씨는 에어컨 기사님을 기다렸어요.

Marina waited for the air conditioner technician.

땀이 많이 났어요.

She sweated a lot.

마리나 씨는 창문을 열었어요.

Marina opened the window.

바람이 안 불었어요.

The wind did not blow.

오후 두 시에 벨이 울렸어요.

At two in the afternoon, the doorbell rang.

기사님이 집에 오셨어요.

The technician arrived at the house.

마리나 씨는 친절하게 인사했어요.

Marina greeted him kindly.

마리나 씨는 시원한 보리차를 드렸어요.

Marina gave him cool barley tea.

기사님이 보리차를 마셨어요.

The technician drank the barley tea.

보리차가 아주 시원했어요.

The barley tea was very refreshing.

기사님이 웃었어요.

The technician smiled.

그리고 기사님이 에어컨을 봤어요.

And the technician looked at the air conditioner.

기사님이 공구를 꺼냈어요.

The technician took out his tools.

기사님이 열심히 일했어요.

The technician worked hard.

기사님이 에어컨을 고쳤어요.

The technician fixed the air conditioner.

에어컨에서 찬 바람이 나왔어요.

Cold air came out from the air conditioner.

방이 아주 시원해졌어요.

The room became very cool.

마리나 씨는 정말 기뻐했어요.

Marina was really happy.

마리나 씨가 감사합니다 하고 말했어요.

Marina said, "Thank you."

기사님이 안녕히 계세요 하고 인사했어요.

The technician said goodbye.

기사님이 집에서 나갔어요.

The technician left the house.

마리나 씨는 시원한 거실에 앉았어요.

Marina sat down in the cool living room.

마리나 씨는 보리차를 마셨어요.

Marina drank barley tea.

오늘 하루가 행복했어요.

Today was a happy day.

Quick facts about Korean

Speakers

About 81 million people speak Korean as a first language (2019–2022 estimates, as cited by Wikipedia).¹

Did you know?

Hangul was officially promulgated in 1446 under King Sejong, and the shapes of its five basic consonants were modelled on the speech organs used to make each sound: ㄱ shows the root of the tongue blocking the palate, ㅁ the mouth.²

The main challenge

Verb endings change with the speech level, which reflects the speaker's relationship to the listener (먹어, 먹어요, 먹습니다), while a separate honorific marker -시- shows respect for the person being talked about.¹

Sources

About the Korean language

Language family	Koreanic, a small family whose only other member is Jeju. No relationship to another family is established: the Altaic proposal has lost most of its support, and links to Japanese remain debated.¹
Speakers	About 81 million native speakers (2019–2022 estimates), almost all in South and North Korea, with long-established communities in China, Russia and Central Asia.¹
Primary script	Hangul (한글; 조선글 in North Korea), an alphabet of 24 basic letters grouped into syllable blocks and written left to right. Chinese characters (한자) still appear occasionally in South Korea; Stichos writes Hangul only.²^,1
Word order & typology	Agglutinative, with SOV order: the verb comes last, particles attach to nouns to mark their role, and modifiers come before what they modify. Apart from the verb, word order is flexible.¹
Official status	Official in South Korea and North Korea; a recognised minority language in China’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai County. The National Institute of Korean Language (국립국어원) regulates the standard in the South.¹^,3

Korean reading proficiency benchmarks (CEFR & TOPIK)

Stichos level	Approximate framework equivalent	Reader profile
A0	Below TOPIK 1	Early Beginner
A1	TOPIK 1	Beginner
A2	TOPIK 2	Elementary
B1	TOPIK 3	Intermediate
B2	TOPIK 4	Upper Intermediate

TOPIK equivalents are approximate. NIIED, which runs TOPIK, publishes no official mapping of its levels to the CEFR; this column follows a 2025 study by Kim, Lee and Lee that linked the two scales level for level. Treat it as a rough guide, not an official equivalence.

Reference corpora

Most published learner vocabulary lists for Korean come from the National Institute of Korean Language (국립국어원).¹

Korean learning vocabulary list: The institute’s 한국어 학습용 어휘 목록 (2003) grades 5,965 words into three bands of 982, 2,111 and 2,872 words, and gives each word its rank in the institute’s 2002 frequency survey of modern Korean (현대 국어 사용 빈도 조사).¹
Counting words: Korean spaces separate 어절 (eojeol): a word together with its attached particles or endings, so 민수가 커피를 마셔요 is three units. Stichos counts sentence length in eojeol and follows standard 띄어쓰기, attaching particles and the copula to the word before them.²

Readability design principles

Park (2018) found that readability formulas built for English give values far outside the expected range on Korean text, and called for formulas designed for Korean. Two published examples:¹

Lee (2020): Bomi Lee scored 160 passages from four Korean-as-a-foreign-language textbooks for vocabulary, grammar and sentence-length difficulty. Grammar correlated most strongly with level, and the regression formula combines grammar and vocabulary.²
KReaD index: Gho and Lee (2020) built an R program that grades 28,332 words into ten bands and reports text difficulty on a 0–2000 scale, alongside sentence length, difficult-word ratio and type-token ratio. It was built for Korean as a first language (국어), not for foreign learners.³
Stichos: Stichos sets difficulty with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length limits, three to five eojeol per sentence at A0, rather than a single readability score.

Script & grammar scaffolding

Speech level: A0 and A1 use the polite informal 해요체 in narration and dialogue alike. Casual 반말 and the plain -다 form are left out, and 합니다체 appears only in fixed formulas such as 감사합니다. The plain narrative style (-ㄴ다/는다) opens at B2.
Tenses: A0 uses only present-tense 해요 forms, with negation by 안. A1 adds the past -았/었어요, the future -(으)ㄹ 거예요 and the wish -고 싶어요, and a story’s narration stays in one tense.
Joining clauses: A0 has no clause-joining endings at all. The only one A1 allows is -고 (“and”). Conditionals with -면 and reasons with -(으)니까 open at A2; indirect speech (-다고 하다), -는데 and basic passives and causatives at B1.
Modifiers: At A0 an adjective never stands before a noun; it is stated as the predicate instead (커피가 뜨거워요, “the coffee is hot”). A1 allows common adjectives before nouns (따뜻한 차) but still no verb relative clauses (마시는 사람).

Related academic & framework resources

TOPIK (National Institute for International Education): NIIED’s overview of the Test of Proficiency in Korean: TOPIK I covers levels 1–2 and TOPIK II levels 3–6, with the score bands for each.
TOPIK and CEFR level descriptors: a comparison and linking study: Kim Chungsook, Lee Junho and Lee Junghee, Journal of Korean Language Education 36(1), 2025, linking TOPIK levels 1–6 to CEFR A1–C2.
한국어 학습용 어휘 목록 (National Institute of Korean Language): The 2003 graded list of 5,965 words for Korean learners, as a downloadable spreadsheet.
A Study on the Development of a Formula for Measuring Difficulty of Korean Reading Texts: Bomi Lee, Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language 56, 2020.
Development of the Korean Language Text Analysis Program (KReaD Index): Gho Yonggu and Lee Gyeongnam, Journal of Reading Research 56, 2020.
Exploring the Possibility of Setting the Level of Korean Reading Materials Using Readability: Park Jungjin, Contemporary Society and Multiculture 8(2), 2018.
Hangul orthography (Wikipedia): An overview of Korean spelling and word spacing.

Frequently asked questions

What writing system does Korean use?: Hangul (한글; 조선글 in North Korea), an alphabet of 24 basic letters grouped into syllable blocks and written left to right. Chinese characters (한자) still appear occasionally in South Korea; Stichos writes Hangul only.
Is Stichos suitable for complete beginners with zero prior knowledge (A0)?: Yes. A0 is a primary focus, designed for readers with no prior knowledge. A1 then adds basic everyday vocabulary and simple connected clauses as your foundation grows.
Are Stichos levels the same as CEFR levels?: Not exactly. Stichos levels use the familiar CEFR names, from A0 to B2, and are modelled on the CEFR (the Common European Framework of Reference), so a Stichos B1 is meant to feel close to a B1 in your course book. They aren't an official CEFR rating, and different books and exams draw the lines in slightly different places. A0 is Stichos's own addition, just below the framework's first level.
Are the stories written by AI, and how accurate are they?: Yes. Stories are generated by AI and then checked by further automated steps against the grammar and vocabulary rules for your level. That catches most problems, but it isn't a human editor, so an occasional unnatural phrase or slip can get through. Treat Stichos as practice material, and check anything you're unsure of with a teacher or a reference.
Can I read stories with explanations in my native language?: Yes. Stichos allows you to pair any target language with any native support language. You can read a Croatian story with French glosses, or a German story with Spanish explanations.
How does word lookup work while reading?: Tap or click any word for its meaning in that sentence, explained in your own language. In the full version, you can save any word to your Vocab Bank for later review.
Is the preview free, and what happens to my email?: Yes. The preview is free and needs no account. If you join the Reading List, we use your email to send your 3 free sample stories (PDF, after you confirm your address) and to let you know when we fully open. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it.
Do stories include audio or narration?: Story narration isn't part of the preview. At launch, the Premium Audio add-on reads every story aloud in a natural-sounding AI voice, in 39 of our 40 languages (Esperanto doesn't have audio support yet).

Teaching Korean? See the tutor page →

Free Sample Readers · Stichos