Learn all about Korean culture while you learn the language! The two go together hand in hand; culture influences language and vice versa so it’s key to learn if you want to really understand Korean.
South Korean Rooms are more than just a PC 방 and 노래방! From entertainment to relaxation, they have a lot of options to hang out with friends or spend some quiet time alone.
Whether you’re worried you will offend or want to impress people, learning Korean etiquette and the dos and don’ts is important! Because of Korea’s unique culture, they have its own etiquette rules and guidelines. Though typically, if they can tell you are a foreigner, Koreans will go easier on you and not expect you to know everything while visiting, so don’t worry about remembering all of these right away!
Tea is a classic drink with a long history, and Korea is no exception. Today I’ll dive a bit into the drink with vocab for the different kinds of tea in Korean, Korea’s culture and history with tea, some Sino-Korean, and more.
Jeju’s Haenyeo (해녀; lit. sea women (海女)) are specialized female divers who earn their livelihood by diving without breathing equipment for abalone, conch, oysters, sea urchins, and more. And have been mastering the practice for multiple generations!
Back in 2023, I did an overview of the Korean Lunar New Year, going through how it is celebrated, key New Year dishes, the difference between Chinese and Korean New Year, and more. Today I want to delve a bit deeper and get more into the customs and zodiacs, and certain things. Koreans still enjoy the January 1st New Year, but it’s more similar to the one over here, without any big family connection.
Today I want to get into Korean dialects! South Korea while being small in size, is quite big in population and history of culture to build their own dialectal variences. I’ll cover the major dialects, where they are from, any notes about them, the pronunciation differences, and then some interesting slang or expressions!
Past swear words some of the most fun things to learn is slang. You can easily connect with and impress Koreans with your knowledge past typical dictionary or textbook-level Korean. So let’s get into some Korean slang. I’ll try to break it down by its meaning/origin and whatever else might be interesting about the word/phrase and see if there is an English equivalent!
Today is 한글날 or Hangul Day, which is a Korean holiday dedicated to celebrating the Korean writing system and its creator King Sejong! So to commemorate, I’ll go through a bit on Hangul’s history, King Sejong, and some resources on how to learn Hangul yourself.
If you’ve been following recent Korean cultural trends you may have heard of Korean MBTI being adapted and gaining huge traction. While the trend of MBTI seems to have died down here, it is going strong in South Korea with many people making judgment calls on people based on their type.
A while back I introduced some common Korean idioms; phrases like “find a needle in a haystack” or “rags to riches”. This time I’m going more into some general Korean metaphors! A few of these will be combinations of different words to create their own meaning, others will have both literal and metaphorical meaning, and some are similar to metaphors in English so let’s get into it.