Intermediate Korean study resources for people with a bit more experience and a higher level in Korean. Go a bit deeper into Korean and start really gaining confidence and finding your voice!
I’m back with more Sino-Korean! The 의 in 의미 meaning comes from the Hanja 意 which means thought/idea/opinion. You’ll see 의 in words related to meaning, intention, willingness, and even carelessness.
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.
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!
Sometimes it’s hard not to feel stuck in a rut, especially if you are self-studying and don’t have a clear lesson plan to follow. Or maybe you feel tired of what you are currently doing. Trying out new methods to learn Korean is a good idea to revitalize your motivation! You can decide to pair a new technique alongside what you have already or swap entirely if it works for you.
不 means “not” and is very much like not, non-, un-, dis-, etc. in English! It generally appears in Korean as 불 or 부 at the front of a word. With that said Let’s get into some negative Hanja words! I’ll start out by breaking some of the words down, so you get the 2-for-1 combo~
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 ago I touched on Korean body vocab, now it’s time to dive deeper and go inside the body to the organs! I’ll cover Korean organ vocab from internal and external, along with bones, muscles, and more.
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.
I mentioned it in passing in my Summer vocab post but camping in Korea has really picked up in popularity recently. I thought it would be interesting to get into it since camping in Korea is a bit different than in Canada or the USA like I am used to.
Konglish comes from Korean + English and is the term used to refer to Korean loanwords from English. But there are more words in Korean grabbed from than just English! The biggest would be Chinese which is the origin of Sino-Korean words and numbers, which you can learn more about in my Sino-Korean introductory post.