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Korean Sentence Endings: -네요, -잖아요, -거든요 and What They Really Mean
You know 비가 와요 means “it’s raining.” Then a drama character looks out of a window and says 비가 오네요, and someone else says 비가 오잖아요, and a third says 비가 오거든요 — and all three are apparently still just saying it’s raining. They are not. Korean sentence endings like these do not change what…
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How to Write Hangul: Stroke Order for All 24 Letters
You learned to read Hangul in a week. Then you picked up a pen, and it turned out that recognising ㄹ and drawing ㄹ are not the same skill at all. Learning how to write Hangul takes far less time than learning to read it, because the whole system runs on three rules. Not fourteen…
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How to Say You’re Sick in Korean: Pharmacy and Clinic Phrases
It is ten at night. Your stomach has turned on you, and there is a green cross glowing on the corner because in Korea there is always a pharmacy on the corner. You do not need conversational fluency for this. You need about eight sentences. Saying you are sick in Korean runs on one adjective,…
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Korean Texting Slang: ㅋㅋ, ㅇㅇ, ㄱㅅ and How to Read a Korean Chat
Learning Hangul takes about a week, and after that a menu, a shop sign and a subway map all start to make sense. Then a Korean friend sends you this: ㅇㅇ ㄱㅅ ㅋㅋㅋㅋ Not a single vowel. Nothing you can pronounce. Nothing in any textbook. Korean texting slang runs on a trick English cannot pull…
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K-Pop Korean: The Words in Every Lyric, and Why Lyrics Break the Rules
You have heard 사랑해 a thousand times. You probably know 보고 싶어 and 괜찮아 without ever having studied them. Then you look up the lyrics, and something is off. The line you hear as niga is written 네가. Half the sentences have no ending. The word order does not match anything in your textbook. K-pop…
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K-Drama Korean: The Phrases You Hear in Every Single Show
You have watched forty episodes. You know 헐 and 대박 by sound. You could pick 어떡해 out of any scene. You also cannot find a single one of them in your textbook. That gap is the whole problem with K-drama Korean. Textbooks teach 존댓말 — the polite form you use with strangers, shopkeepers and your…
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Korean Age: Why You Might Be Two Years Older in Korea
You meet someone in Seoul. You know from their profile that they were born in November 1999, which makes them twenty-six. They introduce themselves and say 스물여덟이에요 — twenty-eight. Nobody is lying. Korean age is a different arithmetic, and for most of the last century it was how Koreans counted in everyday life. In June…
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Konglish: The Korean Words You Already Know (and the Five That Will Trick You)
The first time a beginner reads a Korean café menu out loud, something strange happens. 아메리카노 · 카페라테 · 아이스크림 · 샌드위치 They have never studied any of those words. They understood all of them. Korean has borrowed an enormous amount of English — enough that the moment you can read Hangul, several hundred words…
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Shopping in Korean: What to Say, and What the Cashier Will Say Back
Korean shops are two different worlds, and most phrasebooks blur them into one. In a convenience store, an Olive Young, or a department store, the price is the price. Asking for a discount there is not shrewd — it is slightly embarrassing, like haggling at a supermarket checkout. In a traditional market or an underground…
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Korean Question Words: Why 뭐 Stays Where the Answer Goes
English rips the question word out of the sentence and drags it to the front. I ate kimchi. → What did you eat? What came from the end and moved to the beginning. The verb changed shape. An extra word — did — appeared out of nowhere. Korean does none of that. Korean question words…