Korean study blog for my help and yours. Korean grammar and vocabulary posts as well as interesting cultural knowledge!
A useful phrase to learn when starting out is “from A to B” in Korean. Describe directions and locations, time, sequences, and more by using these 3 simple particles. Now in some cases, you’ll use 에서 or 부터 but I’ll get into when to use which so let’s start!
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 calmed down here, it is going strong in South Korea. With many people even making judgment calls on people based on their type!
First as an introduction, MBTI comes from the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator which is a personality quiz to sort people into 1 of 16 types; all based around a combination of 4 letters. First established around 1944, the personality typing has been refined throughout the years.
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.
Learning these words, along with general body vocab over here, is helpful in medical situations but also can help during daily life. Simple things like “my stomach hurts” and “her muscles are sore” all the way to “he had to get heart surgery”. Now this isn’t an exhaustive list by any means but it’s something to get you started to understanding your body in Korean a little 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.
놀다: to play/hangout
먹다: to eat
놀다 + 먹다 combined together means “to live idly/without purpose”. Living an easy comfortable life without a job or work, just playing and eating your life away haha
그냥 놀고 먹고 싶어요: I want to just live idly
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.
Today we’ll get into loanwords from other countries. I would argue that Chinese influence is similar to Latin’s influence on English, and we don’t consider those to be loanwords (plus there is way too much to list out in one post) so I’ll skip all that but if you’d like to learn those you can check out the Sino-Korean category too.
