"When should we start English?" is the question we hear most from parents of younger children. Before deciding, there is something to establish first: when the school starts, and how much it teaches. Once those numbers are clear, what to do at home tends to settle itself.

What "starts in Year 3" actually means

In the national curriculum English enters the subject groups from Year 3. Years 1 and 2 are built around Korean and mathematics together with the three integrated subjects, and English is not timetabled as a formal subject. Many schools run English in after-school programmes, but that is a different thing from a timetabled lesson.

In other words, the point at which school takes responsibility for teaching English is Year 3, and everything before that is left to individual families. That structure is a large part of why the pre-school English market grew as it did.

How much lesson time is that

This is where parents are usually surprised. Years 3–4 are timetabled at around two hours a week, Years 5–6 at around three hours a week. Schools may adjust allocations within a permitted range, so the figure varies a little from school to school, but that is the shape of it.

Add up all the English lessons across four years of primary school and the total often falls short of two or three years at a private academy. That is why fluency from school lessons alone is an unrealistic expectation. Read the other way round, though, it also means the lessons are designed for a child meeting English for the first time. Starting in Year 3 does not leave a child unable to follow.

So should English start before school

This is not a question with a yes or no answer. Instead we suggest judging it against two tests.

First, is it crowding out Korean literacy? In the early primary years the ability to read and understand in the mother tongue matters more than anything else, because it underpins every other subject later on. If English study is eating into Korean reading time, the order has been reversed. The support available through school is set out in what to do when primary literacy worries you.

Second, is the child coming to dislike English? In a subject where starting in Year 3 is not late, losing interest beforehand is the costliest outcome. Not building a negative memory of English pays off more over time than getting ahead on content.

What works at home, and what does not

Before school and in the early years, exposure to sound comes before work on letters. Songs, short videos and picture books with repeated phrases suit this stage. Learning grammatical terms or sitting vocabulary tests, by contrast, returns little for the effort at this age.

If reading is to begin, it sits naturally after Korean reading is secure. Taking on two writing systems at once lengthens the confusion for some children. And whatever is done, the rule is short and often. Ten minutes daily leaves far more at this age than two hours at the weekend.

Where school English divides after Year 3

Years 3–4 are led by listening and speaking; reading and writing take on more weight in Years 5–6. So a child who kept up comfortably through Years 3–4 sometimes meets difficulty for the first time in Year 5. Typically this is a child who was familiar with the sounds but never practised mapping them onto letters.

What to check at that point is not the size of the vocabulary but whether known sounds can be connected to written words. If that is where it breaks down, going back to the basics of reading is faster than pushing further ahead.

In summary

School begins English in Year 3 and spends two or three hours a week on it. Knowing only this removes a good deal of unnecessary anxiety. English before school is a choice rather than a requirement, and it is worthwhile only where it does not damage Korean literacy or the child's attitude. For how to sequence study in the primary years, see thirty minutes a day — what to do first.