One of my students recently introduced me to this smartphone app. I’ve known about the Webtoons for a while now because my high school computer students constantly want to read those in class when they finish their work (since the school doesn’t want games, videos, or Facebook happening). I also found the mobile site randomly when one student was looking at DICE (다이스).
Available on
Benefits
- All the students are reading comics on Naver Webtoons these days. You’ll be able to relate to them on a whole new level. Ask them what they like and check them out.
- You can manage and save your Webtoons so that you can always keep up with those – even across multiple devices (requires login).
- It’s a highly entertaining way to study Korean and practice your reading (some comics even include background music to really help you get the right feeling for the action). I like to envision the sounds and voices in my brain (or out loud) like video anime – overly dramatic!
- If you’ve ever seen a manga (만화 in Korea), you know that it’s rife with onomatopoeia (the use of words to mimic sounds). (And I hear onomatopoeia is important for the Intermediate TOPIK.) See the examples below:
Some examples of onomatopoeia from DICE (다이스)
How to get the most out of Naver Webtoons
In order to benefit the most from Naver Webtoons (i.e. subscribe to your favorites), you’re going to have to create a Naver account. That’s very easy on a smartphone (and a little more complicated on the web, though the steps are basically the same). Follow the slideshow below for instructions on how to join:
A good place to start
Once you’ve joined Naver, you can log in and begin finding, reading, and subscribing to Webtoons. A great place to start is a comic I saw recommended at koreanstudentblog. The comic name is “Penguin loves Mev” and is written by a Korean woman (married to a British man) in the UK. The great thing about this comic is that the online and mobile versions of it contain English translations of everything in the sidebar:
Here are Penguin’s:
More cool Webtoons
Here are some other cool Webtoons that I’ve found:
What do you think of Naver Webtoons? Have you found any interesting comics? How do they help you study Korean?
i came across the onomatopoeia “seuk” while proofreading a korean webtoon but i have no idea what it means…
Hi, Penguin loves Mev sounds like a great recommendation, but I can’t see the translation. Do you need to be logged in to Naver to see the English translation, or is there some config option that you need to set?
It looks like the more recent editions of Penguin loves Mev are entirely in Korean. You’d probably need to check back at some of the very first comics in the series to see the ones with translations.