90 Day Korean Review: Korean Lessons

Since 2013, 90 Day Korean has been promoting an appreciation of the Korean language and culture through free content on Instagram, YouTube, and other places around the internet. The team behind the platform includes both native speakers and enthusiasts learning Korean as their second language, and they love sharing their knowledge and cultural insights with people like you.

Check out all of the free resources first

We recommend that you go to the "Start Here" link found at the top of the page. It'll give you for free what a lot of platforms charge for, like alphabet and number basics and an introduction to Hangeul. You could easily spend hours getting started on recognizing Korean words, getting some background on K-dramas, or getting introduced to new facets of Korean culture.

Subscription required

But, of course, 90 Day Korean hopes to spark your interest in learning even more, so that you'll want to sign up for their subscription-based Korean lessons. There are two routes you can go: Standard is ideal if you already have a native speaker of Korean to give you feedback, and the VIP is worth considering if you would like personal coaching and homework grading.

Four 90-day modules for a year of studies

There are four included levels of Korean instruction in 90 Day Korean. The first module is designed to take you from having no fluency in the language to being able to hold a 3-minute conversation. The rest of the modules help you to advance, bringing you to an intermediate level of fluency by the time you finish the fourth module. You can skip around as needed to study what you need at the moment (which is helpful if you already know some Korean) but everything is designed to be sequential to help you progress smoothly. Those lessons are referred to as the "Inner Circle".

Community forum to connect with other students of Korean

What else do you get with your 90 Day Korean subscription? There are community forums you can use to interact with other learners, about the language, the culture, or virtually anything. Which K-dramas are people recommending on Viki? Is there a good Korean restaurant near you so you can try some tteokbokki? This is a solid place to get those answers and many others from your peers on the platform.

Get a language workout in the "Korean Gym"

Another feature is the "Korean Gym". No, you're not going to learn weightlifting terms or take a yoga course here; instead, this is an area to get short "workouts" for your language learning. If you're looking for a quick course on a particular topic, like travel vocabulary or culture, this is where you'll find it.

VIP membership lets you work with a native speaker coach

Finally, if you subscribe to the VIP tier, you'll have access to the "Korean Coach" section of the site. This is where you'll connect with your designated native speaker who will give you feedback on your homework assigned through the site and help you make progress as you take the lessons on 90 Day Korean.

No free lessons

So, now that you have the overview, let's look at some of the details. It took a lot of work to find the option to get a free lesson from 90 Day Korean. Eventually, we found it at the bottom of the Testimonials/Student Reviews page. But, all that gave us was a free "Korean Reading Cheat Sheet", and nothing that would let us preview how the platform structures its language lessons. While most Korean lesson platforms let you try the site for a while or give you one full, free lesson, 90 Day Korean doesn't pull back the curtain very much. In the past, the site let prospective students pay $1 for a trial (and we're not sorry to see that go, honestly), but that doesn't seem to be on offer now.

All you get is a peek at the member dashboard

Would you at least like a peek at the Member's Area? When we went to navigate away from the 90 Day Korean site, we got a pop-up offering a 4-minute preview of the membership. (That may be available somewhere else on the website, but that's how we discovered it.) It's a good way to really see what Inner Circle, Korean Gym, My Korean Coach, and My Community will look like if you sign up. Still, it was disappointing to us that we had to look at third-party sites and bloggers to see screenshots of how 90 Day Korean presents its lessons. And we actually liked what we saw there.

Prices have gone up

As with everything these days, pricing has gone up at 90 Day Korean since our last review. You'll still pay just $35/month for the Standard plan, but the discount for paying annually has gone down: in the past, it was $239/year, but at the time of this review that had increased to $299. For the VIP plan, the monthly cost increased from $47 to $59, and the annual discount went way down: you'll now pay $500 for a year's membership, when it used to be $327. Ouch. But, keep in mind that if you have more than one person in your household learning the language, you can get a 25% discount on each person's registration if you reach out via email and ask for a family plan.

30-day money-back guarantee if you don't love it

We wish we could say that thousands and thousands of people are using 90 Day Korean and loving it. That might actually be true. But aside from some testimonials on their website, we didn't find an overwhelming amount of feedback. The good news is that there's a 30-day money-back guarantee here, and we didn't see any indication that the company doesn't honor it completely, so you could comfortably give the platform a try for yourself.

Could be great but needs to let people see more before signing up

Bottom line? 90 Day Korean is thorough and if you use it to study Korean for a full year or more (4 modules of 90 days each = a year-ish), chances are good that you'll be pleased with your fluency through the lessons presented. You're protected by that 30-day guarantee if you want to give it a go, but you may want to sign up for a monthly subscription first and then change to the annual plan if you plan on really studying consistently. However, because this service makes it so difficult to see specifics of how they teach Korean and what learners can expect, we can't give it anything beyond an average rating. It may very well be worth the $500/year or $59/month to get access to coaching and homework corrections, but 90 Day Korean doesn't do a great job of selling you on what they offer.

Learn More  ➜

On the 90 Day Korean website