Making Korean friends is a huge advantage to learning the language. Learn some Korean friend culture and impress your friends with your know-how! These will help you relate and connect more with new Korean friends
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
Superstitions are a really unique part of a culture. They can be tied to history, folklore, mythology, or just wordplay! If you’re going to/living in Korea or just meeting Korean friends learning about Korean superstitions can help you avoid making awkward mistakes or offending people. Also, it helps you connect with people more and integrate yourself into the community. So here are some popular Korean superstitions from the lucky, unlucky and strange/funny!
Want to test your Korean speaking abilities? or just learn something to show off and impress people a bit? Saying a Korean tongue twister is a fun way to test out your Korean and take it lightheartedly because even native speakers mess up with these so it’s okay if you misspeak or stumble through it a bit!
Happy December! December is a big time for holidays and celebrations world-wide and Korea joins in- though the celebration in Korea is a bit different. South Korea also celebrates Christmas but instead of the traditional focus on family the focus is more on romance!