HANGIL한길

What it does

HANGIL teaches Korean in two directions at once, because the people who need the first one usually want the second.

The exam side covers the EPS-TOPIK — the Korean test you sit to work in Korea under the Employment Permit System, the route to an E-9 visa. It drills the question types the paper actually uses — including the picture questions the paper opens with, both directions: see a drawing and choose the Korean word, or hear a sentence and choose which of four drawings it describes. Alongside those it drills what a sign means, which word fills the gap, which sentence says the same thing, and what the two people in the conversation just agreed. Then there are two full practice papers, forty questions each, with a fifty-minute clock that does not stop. You find out what you got wrong at the end, with the reason, one question at a time.

If you are applying for manufacturing work, there is also a section for your trade: eight job groups, from rubber and plastic to food processing, each with 26 words and 20 questions.

The course side is twenty-four grammar units that start at this is a passport and end at reading the sentence in your contract that says wages shall be paid on a fixed date at least once a month. Each unit is a written explanation, a table, five or six real sentences with audio, the mistakes people actually make, and a mixed exercise set — multiple choice, word order, listening, matching.

Everything you answer comes back at a widening gap — a day, then three days, then about a week, then about three weeks, and further apart after that. Something you get wrong starts again from today. A word you fumbled in unit three will find you again while you are in unit eleven, which is the whole point. There are two review decks, because there are two jobs: the Korean itself (the alphabet, the course, the vocabulary) is reviewed on its own tab, and exam questions you missed are gone over inside the exam side.

Every Korean sentence in the app has a play button. On a phone the voice is your own phone’s. Nothing is downloaded or streamed, so the audio works in airplane mode on a factory floor with no signal. On Android you choose which speech engine and which of its Korean voices reads to you. Phones often have several installed and they do not sound alike, so it is worth a minute in Settings to find the one you can listen to for an hour.

It starts with the alphabet. Eight short lessons take you from the six plain vowels to reading any block, and the last one covers how blocks change each other when spoken — why 한국어 is said 한구거, and every 합니다 you hear is 함니다. Each lesson walks through its letters, then asks you to read blocks and to pick the one you heard from four that differ by a single letter. Alongside the course there are 197 words grouped by where you will hear them — the shop floor, the safety notice, the payslip, the clinic, the farm.

Two shelves sit empty on purpose, for material published free by HRD Korea — the government agency that runs the EPS-TOPIK — that you download yourself. One takes the official listening files; the other takes the official pictures, and a picture named after one of the app’s own drawings quietly takes its place in every question that used it.

Who it’s for

Anyone preparing for the EPS-TOPIK, and anyone already working in Korea whose Korean has stopped improving because survival Korean is enough to get through the day.

It assumes nothing. If you cannot read 한글, the alphabet lessons come first, and the home screen always says what to do next. If you can already hold a conversation, the last six units are the ones that sound like an adult — modifying clauses, reported speech, the endings that carry attitude, and the plain written style that contracts and government notices are written in.

It is built for a phone, used standing up, in the twenty minutes you have. Every screen works one-handed, nothing needs a connection, and losing your place costs nothing.

What it is not

It is not the exam, and it cannot tell you whether you will pass.

The practice questions were written for this app in the shapes the real paper uses, and the drawings are original line art made for it — nothing is traced, scanned or lifted, and none of it is a past paper. The cut score is set by HRD Korea for each round and is not a fixed number, so the app scores you out of 200 and stops there: a number claiming to predict a pass would be a number invented to sound useful.

It is not affiliated with HRD Korea, the EPS programme, or any exam body. It is an independent study app. It charges nothing, carries no endorsement, and nothing you do in it is registered anywhere.

It is not a translator or a legal reader. The last unit teaches you to read the grammar of a contract, which is worth a great deal and is not the same as advice. If a document affects your pay or your visa, 고용노동부 고객상담센터 ☎ 1350 is free, has interpreters, and is open on weekdays 09:00–18:00. Any 외국인노동자지원센터 will read a contract with you.

It bundles no HRD Korea material. Their listening files and pictures are published free; the app leaves a shelf for each and ships them empty.

Your data

Nothing about you leaves the device. There is no server, no account, no sign-up, no analytics and no telemetry. Your progress, your review schedule and your exam scores stay in the app’s own storage on your device — the Android app’s, or your browser’s. That is not a setting you switch on. The app has no code that sends them anywhere.

The Android app goes further: it has no internet permission at all, so Android itself enforces this. The web app makes no network requests of its own once it has loaded. The one thing that can go out is a sentence being read aloud in Chrome or Edge on a computer, explained below.

One thing to know about the audio in a browser. In Chrome and Edge on a computer the app reads Korean with the browser’s online voice, because it is far better than the voices those browsers have on the device. An online voice works by sending the sentence being spoken to Google or Microsoft. That sentence is the app’s own Korean and nothing else — never your answers or your progress. With no connection, a voice on the device takes over. If you would rather nothing went out at all, pick an on-device voice in Settings. Safari, phone and tablet browsers, and the Android app all speak on the device.

The trade-off is real: clear the browser’s data and your progress goes with it. Settings has a backup you can save to a file and restore later, and it is worth doing before you change phones.