What are some effective options for an American with no nearby Korean-speakers to learn Hangul?

Question

After studying the evolution of language at a very superficial depth I've decided that I want to be able to communicate using Hangul at something like the conversational level. There seem to be no fluent Korean individuals in my area to help me practice. What would be a good way for someone in my situation to proceed?

Answer 1

Hangul, the writing system, is the easy part: Jeong In-ji said "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days" in the postface to the Hunminjeongeum Haerye. You can learn Hangul easily without interacting with any native speakers, but learning vocabulary, grammar points, colloquialisms, and how to understand dialects would be much more difficult.

Duolingo's Korean program is decent but not fantastic. The Korean From Zero series (three books with online audio available) is pretty good, and supplementing that with the "Talk To Me In Korean" YouTube channel content and maybe "Learn Korean With GO! Billy Korean" would really help.

It's also useful to absorb Korean media. Not K-pop — imagine if you learned English by only listening to American rap and pop music, it would be very awkward in actual conversation! — but watching movies, Korean TV shows (dramas and variety shows), etc. can be very informative.

Answer 2

Consider joining a language exchange, google gives you many sites. There, you and another person "exchange" languages, one you know and another you want to learn and the other person knows.

I am occasional paying member of mylanguageexchange.com, I have no financial interest in promoting it beyond that new members increase the value of my own membership. It has freemium business model, one of the pair has to be paid (golden) member which cost few dollars for few months.

Another way is (paid) online language teachers, like iTalki and others.