Chinese for Korean Speakers
Chinese for Korean speakers starts further ahead than most learners: a large share of Korean vocabulary came from Chinese, so thousands of Mandarin words are near-cognates of words you already own.
What's new is the writing system and the tones. Chenjin is built to train exactly those, on top of the vocabulary head start.
Cash in the Sino-Korean cognates
학생 and 学生, 도서관 and 图书馆: the sound correspondences between Sino-Korean and Mandarin are regular enough that new vocabulary keeps ringing familiar. Reading with audio surfaces those patterns fast, and every word you recognize gets marked and counted on the vocabulary map.
Characters, from hanja or from zero
If you studied hanja, the dictionary's side-by-side traditional and simplified forms map what you know onto what China writes. If you never did, every character comes apart into radicals with the reason it's built that way, plus stroke order drawn in front of you.
Tones, the genuinely new part
Korean isn't tonal, so tones are where your head start runs out. Tone Coach plays a native speaker, records your imitation, and overlays your pitch curve on theirs, syllable by syllable, until the four shapes become muscle memory. Plus plan, 7-day free trial.
Frequently asked questions
I never learned hanja. Do I still get the advantage?
Yes, most of it. The cognate advantage lives in the sounds and meanings of Sino-Korean words, not in reading hanja. You'll learn characters like any beginner, but the vocabulary behind them keeps feeling familiar.
Should I learn simplified or traditional?
Simplified if the mainland is your goal, traditional for Taiwan. Korean hanja is closer to traditional forms, and Chenjin shows both on every entry, so nothing is lost either way.
What trips Korean speakers up most?
Tones first, then false friends: Sino-Korean words whose Mandarin counterpart shifted meaning. The tap dictionary catches those the moment you meet them, and flashcards keep the corrections.
Keep exploring
Try it tonight
The free plan includes the dictionary, the free graded reader, three library articles a day, games, and flashcards. If it fits the way you learn, the Plus plan unlocks the rest with a 7-day free trial.
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