Driving in Korea: which navigation app actually speaks English

Last verified: August 24, 2026. I live in Korea and re-check these posts as things change.

You picked up the rental car, you mounted your phone, and you typed your destination into Google Maps. Nothing. No route, no turn-by-turn, just a map that clearly knows where everything is and won't tell you how to get there.

So you download a Korean app instead. Which one? Search around and you will be told, correctly, that Korean drivers use T Map. You will also see Naver Map and Kakao Map recommended. What almost nobody tells you is that these three are not equally usable if you don't read Korean — and the gap between them is much wider than the gap in their features.

So I tested it the way it actually matters. I set my phone's system language to English — the state a visiting driver's phone is already in — then drove the same stretch of road with each app in turn and photographed what the screen showed while the car was moving.

The short answer

Use Naver Map. Kakao Map is a workable second. Do not rely on T Map, and do not bother with Google Maps for driving.

The reason is not that T Map is a bad navigation app — it is a very good one, and it is the app most Korean drivers reach for by default. The reason is simpler and stranger than that:

T Map has no English mode at all. Not a partial one. Not an awkward one. There is no language setting in the app to change.

That single fact is the most important thing in this post, because T Map is exactly the app a well-meaning local will tell you to install.

Google Maps: still the baseline failure

I have written about this in detail already, but it is worth showing what it looks like from the driver's seat, because it is the moment that sends you looking for alternatives in the first place.

Searching Gangnam Station from the Bundang area. Transit gives me 47 minutes. The Drive tab is selected — and there is no time at all, just a dash, and "Can't seem to find a way there."

Note that this is not Google Maps being unable to find the destination. It knows exactly where Gangnam Station is. It simply will not produce a driving route inside Korea. If you are renting a car, this app is not an option, and no setting fixes it.

T Map: the one everyone recommends, and the one you cannot use

T Map is excellent at the actual job. Its traffic data is the best of the four, it handles Korean expressway junctions cleanly, and if you can read the screen it will get you there faster than anything else.

Here is the screen.

Every element is Korean. The destination heading (수원, 수지구청), the road names, the remaining time and distance, and the location bar at the bottom (경기 용인시 수지구 죽전2동). There is not one English word on the screen.

My first assumption was that I had missed a setting somewhere. So I checked it in the way that settles the question rather than the way that flatters my conclusion.

The phone's system language was set to English for this whole test. On that same phone, in the same session, Naver Map and Kakao Map both switched themselves to English automatically. T Map did not. It stayed exactly as you see above.

Then I went through T Map's settings looking for a language option, and there isn't one to find. So the app neither offers its own English toggle nor follows the language your phone is already set to.

This is not a recent regression, either. In December 2020 a user asked for an English version in a Google Play review, and T Map's own developers replied that it was under internal discussion but that limited resources made it difficult to deliver in the near future. Six years later I still can't find one, and nothing in the app's release notes suggests it arrived.

Which means the voice guidance is Korean too, necessarily. There is nothing to switch.

I want to be fair about what this is and isn't. This is not a bug, and T Map is under no obligation to serve foreign drivers. But it does create a specific trap: T Map is the app a Korean friend, a rental agent, or a forum thread will most likely recommend, precisely because it is the best app — for them. If you install it on that advice and only find out on the highway, you have a problem that no amount of fiddling will solve.

Kakao Map: translated halfway

Kakao Map does have an English mode, and at first glance it looks like it works.


Place names and distances come through in English, and they are handled well — "1.1km", "Byeoksan Town 3 Complex APT", "Dongsung Transportation CNG Filling Station", and even "Jukjeon Rest Area in Seoul direction", which is a genuinely careful translation of a Korean highway sign convention.


Then you look at what you actually steer by. The direction guidance reads 용인, 수원 방면 — "toward Yongin and Suwon" — entirely in Korean. The speed camera label is Korean. The clock reads 오후 05:45 rather than 5:45 PM. The road name along the bottom, 분당수시간고속화도로, is Korean only.

So the pattern is: Kakao translates the things it has in a database, and leaves the things it generates on the fly. Points of interest have English names stored against them. Directional phrasing, time formatting, and some road names do not, and those fall back to Korean.

It is usable. You will get where you are going. But you will be reading around Korean text at exactly the moments a highway junction is asking you to pick a lane.

Naver Map: the best of the four, with one blind spot

Naver Map is the most thoroughly translated of the three Korean apps, and it is what I would put on a rental car's windshield mount.


Road names are romanized consistently — "Gwanggyohosu-ro", "Seongnam-daero" — businesses appear under their English names, the clock reads "5:36 PM", and it even translates structural terms: 삼거리 appears as "Three Way Intersection" rather than being left as a transliteration.

And then there is this.


The blue banner across the top — the single element your eyes go to first while driving — reads "258m 분당수서로". The distance is in numerals, so that part is fine. The road name is not translated.

This is a small failure in absolute terms and an annoying one in practice, because the turn banner is the one part of the screen designed to be read at speed. Everywhere else on the display, Naver has done the work. In the one place where you have half a second to glance, it hands you Hangul.

It is still the best option available, and the gap between "one Korean element" and "every Korean element" is enormous. But I want to be accurate: there is no app that gives you a fully English driving experience in Korea. Naver comes closest.

What the voice guidance actually sounds like

Both Naver Map and Kakao Map do speak English out loud, and this matters more than the screen does, because the whole point of turn-by-turn audio is that you don't have to look.

The caveat is one you can probably predict: the English voice engine is reading romanized Korean place names, and the result is often not what a Korean speaker would recognize. Names come out flattened and oddly stressed. You will hear something approximate, work out which road it means from context, and move on. It is a little disorienting for the first ten minutes and then it stops mattering.

What matters is that it exists. With Naver or Kakao you can drive with your eyes on the road and let the audio carry you. With T Map you cannot, because there is no English voice to switch to.

The part no navigation app can help you with

There is a second language barrier waiting for you on the road itself, and it is worth knowing about before you set off.

Korean directional road signs — the green and blue ones telling you which way a place is — carry English underneath the Korean, as a matter of national rule. I wrote about that pattern in detail here. But the signs that tell you what the rules are mostly do not. Safety and regulatory signage — school zones, construction, stop and yield markings, no-parking notices — is largely Korean-only.

The one that catches foreign drivers is the school zone (어린이보호구역). Korea marks these heavily, with red road paint, yellow signage and a 30 km/h limit that applies to a specific stretch of ordinary road you might otherwise drive at 50. Between 8am and 8pm, penalties inside a school zone are roughly double what they are elsewhere — a signal violation runs about 120,000 won. And under a 2020 law commonly known as the Minsik Act, injuring a child under 13 inside a school zone carries criminal liability of one to fifteen years, or a fine of five to thirty million won, and it is prosecuted even if you settle with the family.

Your navigation app will warn you about the speed cameras. It will not explain the zone you have entered, and the sign that does explain it is written in a language you are not reading. The practical takeaway is simple: when the road surface turns red and the signs turn yellow, slow to 30 and stay there until it ends. Learn the colours and the shapes; you don't need the words.

So what should you actually do

  • Install Naver Map before you land, set the language to English, and use it as your primary. It is the only one of the four where the majority of the driving experience is genuinely in English.
  • Keep Kakao Map as a backup. It is a fine app with a real English mode, and having a second opinion on a junction is worth the storage.
  • Do not install T Map expecting to use it, however strongly it is recommended to you. If someone tells you it is the best app in Korea, they are right — and it will still be unusable to you.
  • Turn the voice guidance on and trust it. The pronunciation is strange. Follow it anyway; it is doing more for you than the screen is.
  • Watch the road surface, not the signs. Red paint and yellow boards mean a school zone, and the enforcement is serious.

A note on where this comes from

These are screen photographs taken while driving in the Bundang and Suji area south of Seoul, on ordinary suburban and expressway-grade roads, in August 2026. The phone's system language was set to English throughout, and I captured the same kind of moment in each app — an approach to a junction with a turn instruction on screen.

What I have not done is drive every road in the country, and it is possible that some route somewhere produces a different mix of translated and untranslated text than what I saw. The T Map result is the one I am most confident about, because it does not rest on what happened to be on screen at one moment: the phone was in English, two of the three Korean apps responded to that on their own, and the third did not.

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