Korean Graded Stories for Your Teaching Practice

Generate level-matched Korean reading texts with live translations for your learners.

Teaching Korean requires engaging reading texts that fit what your students have learned so far. Using graded readers helps learners build confidence with Hangul and natural sentence structures. Stichos allows you to explore live A0 and A1 story previews today and preview tools designed for Korean educators.

마리나 씨의 에어컨

오늘 날씨가 아주 더웠어요.

The weather was very hot today.

집이 정말 더웠어요.

The house was really hot.

에어컨이 고장 났어요.

The air conditioner broke down.

마리나 씨는 에어컨 기사님을 기다렸어요.

Marina waited for the air conditioner technician.

땀이 많이 났어요.

She sweated a lot.

마리나 씨는 창문을 열었어요.

Marina opened the window.

바람이 안 불었어요.

The wind did not blow.

오후 두 시에 벨이 울렸어요.

At two in the afternoon, the doorbell rang.

기사님이 집에 오셨어요.

The technician arrived at the house.

마리나 씨는 친절하게 인사했어요.

Marina greeted him kindly.

마리나 씨는 시원한 보리차를 드렸어요.

Marina gave him cool barley tea.

기사님이 보리차를 마셨어요.

The technician drank the barley tea.

보리차가 아주 시원했어요.

The barley tea was very refreshing.

기사님이 웃었어요.

The technician smiled.

그리고 기사님이 에어컨을 봤어요.

And the technician looked at the air conditioner.

기사님이 공구를 꺼냈어요.

The technician took out his tools.

기사님이 열심히 일했어요.

The technician worked hard.

기사님이 에어컨을 고쳤어요.

The technician fixed the air conditioner.

에어컨에서 찬 바람이 나왔어요.

Cold air came out from the air conditioner.

방이 아주 시원해졌어요.

The room became very cool.

마리나 씨는 정말 기뻐했어요.

Marina was really happy.

마리나 씨가 감사합니다 하고 말했어요.

Marina said, "Thank you."

기사님이 안녕히 계세요 하고 인사했어요.

The technician said goodbye.

기사님이 집에서 나갔어요.

The technician left the house.

마리나 씨는 시원한 거실에 앉았어요.

Marina sat down in the cool living room.

마리나 씨는 보리차를 마셨어요.

Marina drank barley tea.

오늘 하루가 행복했어요.

Today was a happy day.

Key Aspects of the Korean Language

Speakers

About 81 million people speak Korean as a first language (2019–2022 estimates, as cited by Wikipedia).1

Did you know?

Hangul was officially promulgated in 1446 under King Sejong, and the shapes of its five basic consonants were modelled on the speech organs used to make each sound: ㄱ shows the root of the tongue blocking the palate, ㅁ the mouth.2

The main challenge

Verb endings change with the speech level, which reflects the speaker's relationship to the listener (먹어, 먹어요, 먹습니다), while a separate honorific marker -시- shows respect for the person being talked about.1

CEFR exams

Where students struggle

  • Telling the topic particle 은/는 ("as for...", often known or contrasted information) from the subject particle 이/가 (who or what does the action, often new information), a distinction many learners find confusing.3

Teaching notes

  • Use the polite 해요체 endings (-아요/어요) as the default at A0–A1, since it is the everyday polite style between strangers and acquaintances; leave casual 반말, used between close friends and with children, for later.4

Sources

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
  3. https://www.topikguide.com/difference-between-%EC%9D%80%EB%8A%94-and-%EC%9D%B4%EA%B0%80/
  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_speech_levels

About the Korean language

Language familyKoreanic, a small family whose only other member is Jeju. No relationship to another family is established: the Altaic proposal has lost most of its support, and links to Japanese remain debated.1
SpeakersAbout 81 million native speakers (2019–2022 estimates), almost all in South and North Korea, with long-established communities in China, Russia and Central Asia.1
Primary scriptHangul (한글; 조선글 in North Korea), an alphabet of 24 basic letters grouped into syllable blocks and written left to right. Chinese characters (한자) still appear occasionally in South Korea; Stichos writes Hangul only.2,1
Word order & typologyAgglutinative, with SOV order: the verb comes last, particles attach to nouns to mark their role, and modifiers come before what they modify. Apart from the verb, word order is flexible.1
Official statusOfficial in South Korea and North Korea; a recognised minority language in China’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai County. The National Institute of Korean Language (국립국어원) regulates the standard in the South.1,3
  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
  3. https://www.korean.go.kr/

Korean reading proficiency benchmarks (CEFR & TOPIK)

Stichos levelApproximate framework equivalentReader profile
A0Below TOPIK 1Early Beginner
A1TOPIK 1Beginner
A2TOPIK 2Elementary
B1TOPIK 3Intermediate
B2TOPIK 4Upper Intermediate

TOPIK equivalents are approximate. NIIED, which runs TOPIK, publishes no official mapping of its levels to the CEFR; this column follows a 2025 study by Kim, Lee and Lee that linked the two scales level for level. Treat it as a rough guide, not an official equivalence.

Reference corpora

Most published learner vocabulary lists for Korean come from the National Institute of Korean Language (국립국어원).1

  • Korean learning vocabulary list: The institute’s 한국어 학습용 어휘 목록 (2003) grades 5,965 words into three bands of 982, 2,111 and 2,872 words, and gives each word its rank in the institute’s 2002 frequency survey of modern Korean (현대 국어 사용 빈도 조사).1
  • Counting words: Korean spaces separate 어절 (eojeol): a word together with its attached particles or endings, so 민수가 커피를 마셔요 is three units. Stichos counts sentence length in eojeol and follows standard 띄어쓰기, attaching particles and the copula to the word before them.2
  1. https://www.korean.go.kr/front/etcData/etcDataView.do?mn_id=46&etc_seq=71
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_orthography

Readability design principles

Park (2018) found that readability formulas built for English give values far outside the expected range on Korean text, and called for formulas designed for Korean. Two published examples:1

  • Lee (2020): Bomi Lee scored 160 passages from four Korean-as-a-foreign-language textbooks for vocabulary, grammar and sentence-length difficulty. Grammar correlated most strongly with level, and the regression formula combines grammar and vocabulary.2
  • KReaD index: Gho and Lee (2020) built an R program that grades 28,332 words into ten bands and reports text difficulty on a 0–2000 scale, alongside sentence length, difficult-word ratio and type-token ratio. It was built for Korean as a first language (국어), not for foreign learners.3
  • Stichos: Stichos sets difficulty with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length limits, three to five eojeol per sentence at A0, rather than a single readability score.
  1. https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereArtiView.kci?sereArticleSearchBean.artiId=ART002418674
  2. https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereArtiView.kci?sereArticleSearchBean.artiId=ART002560113
  3. https://kiss.kstudy.com/Detail/Ar?key=3817702

Script & grammar scaffolding

  • Speech level: A0 and A1 use the polite informal 해요체 in narration and dialogue alike. Casual 반말 and the plain -다 form are left out, and 합니다체 appears only in fixed formulas such as 감사합니다. The plain narrative style (-ㄴ다/는다) opens at B2.
  • Tenses: A0 uses only present-tense 해요 forms, with negation by 안. A1 adds the past -았/었어요, the future -(으)ㄹ 거예요 and the wish -고 싶어요, and a story’s narration stays in one tense.
  • Joining clauses: A0 has no clause-joining endings at all. The only one A1 allows is -고 (“and”). Conditionals with -면 and reasons with -(으)니까 open at A2; indirect speech (-다고 하다), -는데 and basic passives and causatives at B1.
  • Modifiers: At A0 an adjective never stands before a noun; it is stated as the predicate instead (커피가 뜨거워요, “the coffee is hot”). A1 allows common adjectives before nouns (따뜻한 차) but still no verb relative clauses (마시는 사람).

Related academic & framework resources

Frequently Asked Questions for Educators

What does the live preview allow me to try right now?
You can generate and read a sample story at the A0 or A1 level right now. Interactive features like line-by-line translations and tap-to-translate vocabulary are available in the preview. Additionally, if you join the Reading List, you will receive 3 free sample stories in PDF format without needing to create an account.
Which levels will be supported when Educator Studio opens?
At launch, Educator Studio will cover every level from A0 through B2. You will be able to create texts across this entire range to match your students' current abilities.
How do I share Korean stories with my students?
At launch, you can send any story you create to your students using a web link, with no limit on how many share links you can generate. Your students can open and read the shared text directly in their browser without creating an account, though they are invited to set up a free account if they wish to save their stories and vocabulary.
Can I adapt the grammar and vocabulary for my specific lessons?
Yes. At launch, you can paste a list of specific vocabulary for Stichos to include in a level-matched text, select which tenses to include, choose any topic, and edit any sentence or translation before sending the text to your class.
How accurate are the texts generated by the platform?
Stories are written by AI and automatically checked against the vocabulary and grammar rules for the selected level. Because an automated system rather than a human editor performs this check, an occasional error can occur, so you should review any story before sending it to your students.
How do audio pronunciations work for students?
At launch, students reading a shared text can tap a word to hear it pronounced using a standard computer voice. If you choose the optional Premium Audio add-on at launch, students receive natural-sounding voices for individual words, full story narration with distinct voices for different dialogue speakers, and options to export MP3 audio files.
Can Stichos help explain tricky Korean grammar like particles?
Yes. Korean learners often struggle to distinguish between topic particles (은/는) and subject particles (이/가). When your students read a story, they can tap any word to view its specific meaning in that sentence, explained in their own native language.

Learning Korean yourself? Try the learner reader →

Free Language Reading Samples for Tutors · Stichos