Korean Language
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Korean Language

Headline Photo by Momo Takahashi (NYU Tisch), "To Be American", 2017.

The Korean language courses at the East Asian Studies Department offers four levels of Korean from Elementary to Post-Advanced, 4th Year Korean. The program aims to construct a strong foundation for students who intend to pursue academic research or careers involving the Korean language. Our curriculum is designed to develop all four language skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing and to provide proficiency-based sequential courses that lead students to a high level of competence in Korean. Elementary and Intermediate Korean language courses have two tracks: One-year regular track and One-semester Advanced speakers track. The track is decided, not by ethnic origin, but by students’ speaking and comprehension skills and exposure to Korean. Advanced Speakers track focuses more on spellings, grammar use, and basic composition as well as develop oral and aural proficiency. The two tracks are integrated into one section at Advanced Korean I. At this level, we expect that students from both tracks have acquired fundamental knowledge and solid skills in Korean and can carry out advanced-intermediate level tasks. Below are our regular course offerings. For further information, please contact the Korean language coordinator.

Course Offerings

Elementary Korean I, II
EAST-UA 254, 255  No previous training in the language is required for EAST-UA 254. Prerequisite for EAST-UA 255: EAST-UA 254 or placement exam. Offered in the fall and spring. 4 points.
First-year Korean. Designed to introduce the Korean language and alphabet, Hangul. Provides a solid foundation in all aspects of the language, including speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Students study the language's orthographic and phonetic systems, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary within social and cultural contexts.

Elementary Korean for Advanced Speakers
EAST-UA 281  No previous formal training in the language is required. Offered every semester. 4 points.
Covers first-year Korean material in one semester. Designed for students who can understand and speak basic to intermediate conversational Korean but do not have previous formal language training. Aims to develop correct pronunciation, grammatical accuracy, and overall competence in reading and writing.

Intermediate Korean I, II
EAST-UA 256, 257  Prerequisite for EAST-UA 256: Elementary Korean II (EAST-UA 255), Elementary Korean for Advanced Speakers (EAST-UA 281) or placement exam. Prerequisite for EAST-UA 257: EAST-UA 256 or placement exam. Offered in the fall and spring. 4 points.
The Korean language at the second-year level: phonetics, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Emphasizes the development of communicative skills in speaking, reading, and writing. Develops the language's major social and cultural contexts. Requires students to write about and discuss various topics.

Intermediate Korean for Advanced Speakers
EAST-UA 282  Prerequisite: Elementary Korean for Advanced Speakers (EAST-UA 281), Elementary Korean II (EAST-UA 255), or placement exam. Offered every semester. 4 points.
Covers second-year Korean material in one semester. Designed for students with intermediate-level speaking proficiency who can understand and produce—with near-standard pronunciation and without basic major grammatical errors—conversational Korean related to daily life situations and simple sociocultural topics, but who have reading and writing ability equivalent to a student who has completed elementary-level Korean. Aims to further strengthen correct pronunciation and intonation, grammatical accuracy, ability to understand differences in nuance, and overall competence in reading and writing. This course satisfies the foreign language requirement.

Advanced Korean I, II
EAST-UA 258, 259  Prerequisite for EAST-UA 258: Intermediate Korean II (EAST-UA 257), Intermediate Korean for Advanced Speakers (EAST-UA 282) or placement exam. Prerequisite for EAST-UA 259: EAST-UA 258 or placement exam. Offered in the fall and spring. 4 points.
Designed to assist third-year students of Korean language as they continue to learn skills in conversation, reading, and writing. Reading Korean newspapers and visiting Korean websites are integrated as part of instruction.

Media Korean
EAST-UA 261  Prerequisites: Advanced Korean II (EAST-UA 259) and permission of the instructor. Offered every year. 4 points.
Fourth-year Korean. This course is designed to improve students' understanding of written and spoken Korean through exposure to various media sources, such as film, magazine, newspaper, TV, Internet, and user-created content (UCC). Students will learn Korean sentence patterns and vocabularies from the sources, develop advanced communication skills in Korean, and discuss various topics related to contemporary issues in Korea. Class discussions help enhance students' speaking proficiency, as well.

Structure of Korean
EAST-UA 283 Prerequisite: Advanced Korean II (EAST-UA 259) or instructor permission. Offered every year. 4 points.
The class is designed for students who would like to enhance the understanding the linguistic features of Korean. The Structure of Korean introduces various aspects of the Korean language, focusing on its uniqueness in light of general linguistics. The course begins with a brief introduction to the language structure in general and proceeds to more extensive overviews of the Korean language such as genetic affiliation, historical development, lexicon, writing system, sound patterns, word structure, and sentence structure. The primary objective of the course is to gain a general understanding of the Korean language and to be able to analyze some of the linguistic phenomena that are unique to the Korean language.

Readings in Modern Korean
EAST-UA 299  Prerequisites: Advanced Korean II (EAST-UA 259) and permission of the instructor. Offered every year. 4 points.
This fourth-year level reading course provides students the opportunity to enhance their Korean literacy skills while doing some concentrated reading on issues, areas, and genres of their own interest. A wide range of texts is used in class, including fiction, poetry, social and cultural criticism, and journalism.

Please contact the Korean language coordinator, Jeesun Park, if you have questions about our Korean language program.