Speak It

Role-play a real situation: order coffee, take a taxi, chat at a concert. You hear the other person, answer out loud, and your browser checks what you said.

What Speak It trains

Speak It is speaking practice built around situations you are likely to meet in Korea: ordering at a café, eating at a restaurant, taking a taxi, paying at a convenience store and chatting with someone at a concert. The other person's lines are played with native audio; your lines you say out loud, and the game checks what you said.

How to play

• Choose a scene

  Each scene is a short exchange of about six lines.
• Listen, then answer out loud

  You see the English meaning and the romanization of your line, and you say it in Korean.
• Get checked

  Your answer passes when it is close enough to the expected line, syllable by syllable. Natural alternatives are accepted too — 포장해 주세요 and 포장이요 both work for “to go, please”.

About the microphone and your voice

The game uses your browser's built-in speech recognition, set to Korean. That service is provided by the browser itself, not by this site; in Chrome, for example, the recognition runs on Google's servers. This site does not receive or store your recording. If your browser has no speech recognition (some versions of Safari and Firefox), the game switches to a listen-and-repeat mode where you say the line and check yourself against the audio.

The patterns that carry you through

Most of what you need in a shop or restaurant hangs on one ending: 주세요 (juseyo), “please give me”. Put almost anything in front of it and you have a request: 아이스 아메리카노 한 잔 주세요 (one iced Americano, please), 물 좀 주세요 (some water, please). The café scene also teaches 카드로 할게요 (kadeuro halgeyo), “I'll pay by card”, which you will use more than almost anything else.

Why your pronunciation might be marked wrong

Korean is not always pronounced the way it is written. A final consonant often carries over to the next syllable, and some combinations change sound: 합니다 is pronounced closer to “ham-ni-da” than “hap-ni-da”. If the game keeps missing a line, listen to the native recording again and copy the sound rather than the spelling. Our romanization guide explains why written and spoken Korean drift apart.

How it works

The game runs in your browser. Finished scenes are remembered on this device only. The Korean audio is the same audio set used on the phrase pages.