Learn Korean with songs and stories for kids. This way you can start improving your Korean language skills with real content as an intermediate learner.
Every language learner – be it Korean or another language – reaches a point where he or she is temporarily stuck between an intermediate and advanced level. This is a plateau that is hard to escape. Textbook stories start to bore you, but real Korean tv shows and movies still confuse you. Does this sound familiar?
While it is getting easier to follow Korean tv shows with English subtitles, you are not maximizing your full learning potential by doing this. If you want to take it one step further, you can watch Korean tv shows with Korean subtitles. This is possible at Netflix and Viki. Viki has a handy learning mode, but for it to be effective you have to choose a language you don’t know as the second subtitle. Otherwise, you can just lazily guess the meaning from the translation. It is better to force yourself to only listen to and read Korean.
There is one other source that you can consider for your Korean learning material and that is Korean tv shows and videos for children. While using this resource, you can both experience the joy of being able to understand a story, and the frustration of not being able to 100% understand what a 3-year-old can understand without effort.
You can find stories and songs for kids on YouTube or a portal like Naver. Below I will share with you a mix of cartoons, songs, and fairy tales.
Korean stories and songs for kids
1) Kebikids YouTube Channel
The Kebikids (깨비키즈) YouTube channel contains many short clips about many different subjects. Not all videos have embedded subtitles (it is mostly the songs those containing songs do), but the auto-generated close caption can be of some help here (not completely accurate, but you’ll get the gist of the sentence).
While the Kebikids website is a bit easier to navigate, the YouTube channel is easier to access as you don’t need to create an account.
In the example below, you can learn all about the cold noodles dish Naengmyeon (냉면) while practicing your Korean listening skills.
2) Genikids YouTube Channel
At Genikids (지니키즈) you will find many more videos. The videos on this channel are often slightly – or an hour – longer than those on Kebikids. At the bottom of the page, you can find the GeniSchool History channel that can be very educational to Korean kids and foreigners alike.
3) Naver Junior Portal
Naver Junior is an amazing resource. On the Naver Junior portal, you can find a huge amount of videos including videos from Kebikids and Genikids. The fairy tales read out loud (읽이주는 돈화) are quite interesting.
4) Hello Jadoo YouTube Channel
At Hello Jadoo TV (안녕 자두야) you can watch cartoons and songs, many of them quite easy to follow.
5) Stories at Yes24
Yes24 is a portal like Naver. The stories on Yes24 are more advanced because the images don’t illustrate the meaning as well as the images in cartoons do. I used to really like this resource, but lately, I have been having some trouble streaming the videos.
6) Wekiz song YouTube Channel
A good YouTube channel for Korean nursery rhymes is wekiz song.
7) SkySea.TV YouTube Channel
On the SkySea.TV (하늘이와 바다의 신나는 율동 동요) channel you can find sing-alongs of Korean children songs.
8) Korean Fairy Tales on YouTube
The Korean Fairy Tales channel offers, as the title suggests, fairy tales retold in Korean. I recommend using this channel for listening only. Alternatively, you can block the English subtitles (scroll your screen in the right way) for better immersion.
This is only a selection of what’s out there. With the increasing popularity of the Korean language, many more resources are created every day.
What is your favorite YouTube Channel for stories, songs, and fairy tales in Korean?
