우리 공부합시다
Let's study!

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.

놀고 먹다

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

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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!

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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.

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Summer is in full swing here with many days reaching over 30+ Celsius (86 °F) so let’s get into some Korean summer vocab! I’ll also cover some popular activities during the summer that people enjoy and related vocabulary.

What is Summer Like in Korea?

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‘What’ is always a keyword in a language, and important to growing your vocab and skills but there are actually multiple ways to say ‘What’ in Korean! Which one you use depends on the information and the words’ location in a sentence. Don’t worry though, I’ll run through all this simply and give examples to help you master what you need to know.

1. 무엇/뭐

뭐 and 무엇 are probably the ‘What’ you’ll hear the most when starting to learn Korean. But 뭐 is a shortened version and casual form of 무엇. 무엇/뭐 can be used when the subject is unidentified, and should not be used in front of nouns. So for example you cant say “뭐 노래”.

Examples of 무엇/뭐:

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Korean karaoke, or noraebang (노래방) is a huge part of Korean culture and has expanded out to other countries around the world! You’ll find 노래방 in all kinds of situations in Korea. People go to it with friends or classmates, during work events with their teams, and there has even been an increase in people going alone as well.

Here I’ll cover it all, from what makes Korean karaoke different to what to sing there, so let’s get into it~

What is the Difference between Korean Karaoke and American Karaoke?

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