What Korean costs in 2026

Learning Korean can cost nothing, or it can cost a few hundred dollars a month. The free end is real: dramas, YouTube teachers and free app tiers can take you through Hangul and your first few hundred words. Money starts to matter when you want to speak, because speaking needs someone who answers.

The prices below are as of October 2026.

Free: dramas, videos and free apps

Hangul has 24 basic letters, and free videos and apps are enough to learn to read them. Free material is also plenty for listening practice, and there is more of it than anyone could watch.

What free material can’t give you is a reply. A drama keeps going whether or not you answer it, and a video teacher can’t hear you.

Apps: about $10 to $30 a month

Paid language apps mostly sit between $10 and $30 a month, a little less per month if you pay for a year. For that money you get structure: lessons in order, review of the words you are about to forget, streaks, and in some apps a chat with an AI that types or talks back.

Apps are good at reading, vocabulary and grammar drills. The limit of an app is that it only works on the days you open it. When an app has speaking practice, it is usually a sentence to repeat or a short role play, and the conversation ends where the lesson ends.

Tutors: about $15 to $40 an hour

On the large tutoring marketplaces, most Korean tutors charge between $15 and $40 an hour, and some platforms add their own fee on top. Two 30-minute lessons a week come to about four hours a month, which is about $60 to $160.

For that money you get a person. A tutor can explain why your sentence sounds wrong, tell you what people in Seoul are talking about this week and laugh at your joke because it was funny. A tutor can also read your writing and prepare you for a test, which a phone call can’t do.

The limits are time and booking. A lesson happens when both of you can be there. An evening lesson in New York is a morning lesson for a tutor in Seoul, which is 13 or 14 hours ahead depending on daylight saving time. Inside the lesson the tutor talks too, so the time you spend speaking is shorter than the lesson.

A phone friend: what we charge

Pick Up Korean has three plans. Lite is $14.99 a month for 60 minutes of weekly credit, with scheduled calls on up to 3 days a week. Standard is $24.99 for 100 minutes on up to 5 days. Max is $34.99 for 140 minutes on any day of the week. A minute of credit is a minute of talk with a standard partner, so the plans are sized at twenty minutes a day. Paying for a year saves about 15%. Every plan includes calling us whenever you like and texting between calls.

Credit is spent by the minute, and the rate depends on the partner you talk to. A standard partner uses 60 seconds of credit for each minute, and a premium partner, who replies with less of a pause, uses 120 seconds. The rate is the same whether you place the call or we place it to you.

On Standard, ten minutes of talk costs about 58 cents with a standard partner and about $1.15 with a premium partner. An hour comes to about $3.50 or $6.90. With a standard partner, Lite’s credit covers about 4 hours and 20 minutes a month, Standard’s about 7 hours and a quarter and Max’s about 10.

Our phone provider charges us for every minute of a call, in both directions and at nearly the same price either way, and the speech recognition, the voice and the model behind your partner cost us money for every minute too. We set each partner’s credit rate from what a minute with that partner costs us, so the two kinds of partner use credit at different rates and the direction of the call changes nothing.

A scheduled call you miss uses no credit. The first call can be free too: the trial call is ten minutes long and needs no account and no card. If the week’s credit runs out and you want more, extra credit is $0.08 a minute, 120 to 480 minutes at a time, and it lasts 30 days.

Count the hours you actually speak

To compare the four, divide what you pay by the hours you actually spend speaking Korean in a month. A $60 month of tutoring with four hours of lessons is $15 per hour of lesson, and more per hour of your own speaking, since the tutor talks too. An app you stop opening costs the same each month while your speaking hours drop to zero.

A call plan also costs the same whether you use all the credit or not. With a plan like ours, the number to watch is how many of your scheduled calls you actually take.

Which one fits

If you want to read and write Korean, start with free material and an app. A phone call is a poor way to learn to read.

If you want lessons in order, homework, test preparation or someone who checks your writing, pay for a tutor.

If you want to speak often, and the hours of talking matter more to you than a face on a screen, a phone friend costs less per hour of talk than the tutor prices above.

You can also mix them: an app for reading, a tutor once a week for the questions that need a person, and calls on the other days.