해 보다 doesn't exactly mean "to try to do"; You should take it literally to some degree: To do something and look for yourself. (하다 + 보다) "공부해보고 있어요" sounds awkward because it's too vague in the sense above. However, if you are talking about a specific thing, it makes sense. 요즘 독일어 공부 해 보고 있어요. Recently, I've been trying to study German. However, it implies that you aren't totally serious about that yet, that you might stop studying German the moment you get the feeling that it isn't for you during the trial phase. ~해 보다 in Korean more or less means to do something carefully while evaluating/estimating the feasibility. Simply put, it's the antonym of "to do something head over heels" ~하려 하다: What you heard about this recently is more accurate: I'd translate to "about to do something", too But as always, it doesn't exactly mean the same. It also implies that you are going to try. This kind of nuance is simply embedded in the expression, maybe it's more about the lack of confidence. You can hardly translate anything from English to Korean and vice versa word for word. That's the main difficulty in learning Korean for westerners and English for Koreans. (English is a really hard language for Koreans for the same reason) Sometimes you simply have to let it go until you get a feeling about those problematic ones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwEAsmDx_Ck&t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X4h-NN_RdQ He has many great videos about the conceptual differnces between both languages. Strongly recommended.

~려고 하다 means "to intent to do something" 해 보다 means "give something a try (mostly with a light heart)" 해 보다 is not used with ~고 있다. 공부해보고 있다 means "I'm giving studying a try" -- weird expression to try to do something means "~하려고 애쓰다/노력하다" I'm trying to study 공부하려고 노력하고 있어요. 공부하려고 애쓰고 있어요.