- Easy to Learn Korean 866 – Cheers and Encouragement
- Easy to Learn Korean 865 – Healthy Living
- Easy to Learn Korean 864 – Clearance Items and Store Sales (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 863 – Clearance Items and Store Sales (Part One)
- Easy to Learn Korean 862 – Love
- Easy to Learn Korean 861 – Taking It Easy
- Easy to Learn Korean 860 – Lost Artifacts (Part One)
- Easy to Learn Korean 859 – Antonyms – Adjectives (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 858 – Being a Good Person
- Easy to Learn Korean 857 – Counterfeit Goods and Materials
- Easy to Learn Korean 856 – Antonyms – Adjectives
- Easy to Learn Korean 854 – Comparing Things: Less than/More than
- Easy to Learn Korean 853 – Film Director Park Chan-Wook
- Easy to Learn Korean 852 – Gwanghwamun (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 851 – Gwanghwamun (Part One)
- Easy to Learn Korean 850 – Straw Handicraft
- Easy to Learn Korean 849 – Home Remedies (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 848 – Home Remedies (Part One)
- Easy to Learn Korean 847 – Hong Gil-Dong – Korea’s Robin Hood
- Easy to Learn Korean 846 – Pronoun Basics
- Easy to Learn Korean 845 – Traditional wrapping cloth
- Easy to Learn Korean 844 – Museum of Korean Embroidery (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 843 – Museum of Korean Embroidery (Part One)
- Easy to Learn Korean 842 – Errand Service Center
- Easy to Learn Korean 841 – Buckwheat Noodles
- Easy to Learn Korean 840 – Describing someone with amazing skills
- Easy to Learn Korean 839 – Princess Syndrome
- Easy to Learn Korean 838 – Colloquial Expressions – First and Second Party (Gap/Eul)
- Easy to Learn Korean 837 – Older Woman Younger Man Relationship
- Easy to Learn Korean 836 – Death (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 835 – Death (Part One)
- Easy to Learn Korean 834 – Politeness Levels
- Easy to Learn Korean 833 – Humiliation
- Easy to Learn Korean 832 – Different uses of the word ‘iron’
- Easy to Learn Korean 831 – Planning to go to a singing room
- Easy to Learn Korean 830 – Water theme park (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 827 – Making plans to see a movie (Part One)
- Easy to Learn Korean 826 – Comparing People to Animals (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 825 – Comparing People to Animals
- Easy to Learn Korean 824 – Giving a Presentation (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 823 – Giving a Presentation
- Easy to Learn Korean 822 – Sake bar (Japanese-style Izakaya)
- Easy to Learn Korean 821 – Subway Etiquette
- Easy to Learn Korean 820 – Public Bath Etiquette
- Easy to Learn Korean 819 – Good Fortune and Bad Luck
- Easy to Learn Korean 818 – Inviting people to your home
- Easy to Learn Korean 817 – Car Accident
- Easy to Learn Korean 816 – Hair Salon (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 815 – Hair Salon
- Easy to Learn Korean 814 – North Korean rhetoric
- Easy to Learn Korean 813 – Small Cuts and First Aid
- Easy to Learn Korean 812 – Bumps, Bruises, and other Injuries (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 811 – Bumps, Bruises, and other Injuries
- Easy to Learn Korean 810 – Business Conversations (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 288-289 – Yeouido in Seoul
This weekend kicked off the annual cherry blossom/spring festival at Seoul’s Yeouido (Yeoui Island). There are over 1400 cherry blossom trees there.When: Friday April 12 thru Thursday April 18
Where: Yeouido, Seoul - Easy to Learn Korean 348-349 – Combat and the Gaeseong Industrial Complex
North Korea suspended operations of the joint venture Gaeseong Industrial Complex this week. The site makes low-tech goods such as appliances in additional to clothing. According to the Korea Times, 123 manufacturing companies employee 479 South Koreans and 53,000 North Korean factory workers.
- Easy to Learn Korean 809 – Business Conversations
- Easy to Learn Korean 808 – Getting a Medical Examination (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 807- Getting a Medical Examination
- Easy to Learn Korean 806 – Computer Virus
- Easy to Learn Korean 805 – Drinking Tea
- Easy to Learn Korean 803 – Pizza (Part One)
- Easy to Learn Korean 802 – Hard work and stress
- Easy to Learn Korean 800 – Where is…?
- Easy to Learn Korean 799 – Instant Noodles (Part One)
- Easy to Learn Korean 798 – School Districts
- Easy to Learn Korean 797-Splitting the Bill
- Easy to Learn Korean 326-328 – Crime
On Wednesday afternoon, organized cyber attacks took out several Korean banks and broadcasters for 2 hours. The attacks were incorrectly pinpointed to an IP address in China and regulators will not make further announcements until a definitive source is found.
- Easy to Learn Korean 796 – Arriving at a Restaurant
- Easy to Learn Korean 224, 682 – Gwiyomi lyrics, 1+1 Gwiyomi Player, and Acting Cute.
Updated on 10/14/2020
Since earlier this year, the 1+1 Gwiyomi Player game and Gwiyomi chant have gained popularity across the internet. If you do a YouTube search, you’ll see many singers and actresses performing this song-game. Korean girls play this in order to woo men who love the cute factor- and all Korean men love it. This game is also known as Aegyo Gwiyomi or Cutie Player. - Easy to Learn Korean 795 – Clumsy
- Easy to Learn Korean 710 – Korean search engines and websites
Today’s Korea Herald has an interesting article about Korean websites. Believing that it’s safer to keep foreign search engines from indexing all the content on their site, many Korean websites use robots.txt files to block search engine bots from indexing a portion (or all) of their site. The robots.txt files are read by search engine bots as they index websites and the data inside this file lists which pages should not be indexed.
- Easy to Learn Korean 751-752 – Figure Skating.
Kim Yu-na, the 2010 Olympic figure skating champion, was in the news again this weekend for winning the World Figure Skating Championship in London, Ontario (Canada). She had been away from competitive events for nearly two years. Story here.
- Easy to Learn Korean 543-544 – Bullying and cyberbullying
President Park Geun-Hye plans to re-prioritize school bullying on her agenda in response to recent suicides in Korean schools. Students spend long school days together within a competitive education system and bullying frequently surfaces as a result.
- Easy to Learn Korean 793 – Flower Gentlemen.
- Easy to Learn Korean 17, 463-465 – Fashion and clothing
‘Inappropriate clothing’ legislation passed in Korea and goes into effect in 2 weeks. A 50,000Won ($50USD) fine will be imposed on women who wear clothing that provokes others to feel ‘uncomfortable’. Full story.
- Easy to Learn Korean 790 – Popular Catch-phrases
- Easy to Learn Korean 664 – Time zones – Korea Standard Time (KST) and Daylight Savings Time (DST)
This weekend marked the beginning of Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the US and clocks were moved ahead one hour. We remember this by the phrase, “fall back spring ahead”. DST runs from March until November each year.Large countries, like the US, may have as many as three time zones. China, on the other hand, uses a single time zone for their entire country (UTC+8). North and South Korea use a single time zone called Korea Standard Time (KST). Neither country utilizes Daylight Savings Time although South Korea had considered using it several years ago and eventually abandoned the idea. Korea is UTC + 9 hours.
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한국 표준시 (hanguk pyojunsi) – Korea Standard Time (KST)
일광 절약 시간제 (ilgwang-jeolyak sigan-je) – Daylight Savings Time (DST)
Note: DST is commonly called 썸머타임 – which is literally ‘summertime’ (sseommeo-taim)Easy to Learn Korean 664 – Time Zones
Here are some interesting thoughts on why some people believe DST is useless.
- Easy to Learn Korean 562 – Smartphones and Kakao Talk
Korea’s KakaoTalk is a free multi-platform instant messaging app with over 70 million users (mostly in Korea). It’s available for free on Apple iOS, Google Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry phones. The app developers admitted to have been inspired by WhatsApp of the US but they’ve gone on to expand the design. It features a phone number based ID system where your contact list is automatically compared to existing Kakao users and matches are determined to be ‘friends’. KakaoTalk’s explosive growth and success derives from Korea’s quick adaptation to smartphones. Even the word ‘Kakao’ has become synonymous with chatting in Korean.
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카카오톡 (kakao-tok) – KakaoTalk
If you’re living in Korea or have Korean friends abroad, you’ll find KakaoTalk to be indispensable. While it doesn’t necessarily do anything better than other instant messaging apps, you’re guaranteed to find other Koreans using it. I frequently travel and communicate with international friends and KakaoTalk sadly has no use for me. Instead, I spend most of my time using Apple’s iMessage, FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, and Skype. KakaoTalk does support mVOIP for making calls to other Kakao users, but the quality is very poor (especially when calling internationally). I also dislike the app feature that automatically makes every contact a potential app ‘friend’.
KakaoTalk has been in the news recently for several privacy issues as they had stored personal messages on their servers for up to 10 days. Currently, messages are stored for 5-7 days and they’re looking to reduce this in the future. Full story here. On March 6, they posted a notice to the app that there were further security issues and the Emoticons, Themes, and Plus Friend features had to de-activated until users installed a new version of the app.
NHN’s Line is another popular Korean messaging app with over 100 million users globally.
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네이버 (neibeo) – Naver, also a Korean language search engine and portal site
네이버라인 (neibeo-ra-in) – Naver Line - Easy to Learn Korean 789 – Seoul City Hill
- Easy to Learn Korean 788 – Talking on the Phone
- Easy to Learn Korean 5,6,731-734 – Numbers and Counting
Numbers come in two forms: Korean and Sino-Korean numbers. Koreans use many special Counting words with them.
Here’s the complete Numbers and Counting sets!
- Easy to Learn Korean 787 – The NIS (Part Two)
North Korean defectors must keep their identities and personal information confidential. If this information is leaked, family members who are living in the North face severe punishment or torture. Sadly, a defector who was working for the South Korean government on a 2-year assignment, was arrested by the NIS for leaking the identities of defectors to the North. Reports state that data on as many as 10,000 North Korean defectors might have been revealed.
Full story at the Chosun Ilbo.
- Easy to Learn Korean 786 – National Intelligence Service NIS (part one)
President Park Geun-Hye began choosing her Cabinet members on Saturday. Among them, a former Army chief of staff was named Director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS). The NIS is Korea’ central intelligence agency, like the US CIA. Full story at the Korea Times.
- Easy to Learn Korean 205-206 – North Korea
Missiles or crayons?
In today’s news, the Korea Herald reports that up to 70% of North Korean missiles are pointed at South Korea. Click here for the 1000 Missile Story.-
Father – 아버지 (abeoji)
Kim Jong-Il – 김정일 (gim jeong-il)Son – 아들 (adeul)
Kim Jong-Eun 김정은 (gim jeong-eun) - Easy to Learn Korean 297 – Birthday Cake.
Many Korean bakeries and pastry shops make fantastic birthday cakes. While a bit expensive, they include tall candles, matches, and a plastic cutting knife upon request. A complete birthday set!
Prices for premium cakes range from 20,000-40,000Won (approx. $20-40). My favorite is green tea cake.
- blueberry crepe – 블루 베리 크레페 (beullu beri keure-pe)
green tea cake – 녹차 케이크 (nok-cha keikeu) - Easy to Learn Korean 322 – BBQ Shellfish 조개구이.
Grilled Shellfish
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BBQ Shellfish – 조개구이 (jogae-gui)
조개 – shellfish
구이 – barbeque/BBQI found a great BBQ shellfish restaurant in Suwon City, Gyeonggi-do. The price was 17,000Won per person with unlimited refills of shellfish.
- Easy to Learn Korean 785 – Apartment repairs and maintenance (part two).
- Easy to Learn Korean 784 – Apartment repairs and maintenance (part one).
- Easy to Learn Korean 742-743 Fried chicken
Easy to Learn Korean 742 and 743 – Fried Chicken
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I found this new snack that I like called Fried Chicken Drumsticks at the local supermarket in Seoul this week.
Hot Charcoal-Fire Barbecue – 핫숯불바베큐 (hat-sutbul-babekyu) Fried Chicken – 닭 튀김 (dak twigim) or 후라이드 치킨 (literally the English words ‘fried chicken’-huraideu chikin)
They taste like fried-chicken flavored crackers and remind me of Pepperridge Farm’s Goldfish crackers, if you know those. The crackers are wrapped in aluminum foil inside of a small red box that’s strikingly similar to a takeout chicken box. It only costs 900Won (less than $1USD) and is actually worth trying. Real Korean-style Fried Chicken is one of my favorite foods and this definitely reminds me of that.
There are several ways to say chicken in Korean:
1.닭 – chicken
2.닭고기 – chicken meat
3.치킨 – literally the English word ‘chicken’All three of these can be used for chicken meat. Here, 닭다리 (dak-dari) means ‘chicken leg, or chicken drumstick.
- Easy to Learn Korean 783 – Nonhyeon’s Furniture Street (Gangnam)
For those visting Seoul, Gangnam District is a must-see neighborhood that offers trendy places to eat and shop. Psy’s Gangnam Style put the district on the international map by having fun with it’s upper class, but it’s also respected for it’s historical sites. It total, we’ve covered 13 different locations in this district throughout this series. This article focuses on Nonhyeondong’s Furniture Street, an upscale neighborhood in Gangnam with high-end contemporary and traditional furniture. It’s worth a visit.
Here’s a free e-book published by the Gangnam district office.
Gangnam’s Top 21 Destinations - Easy to Learn Korean 10-11 – Asking directions
- Easy to Learn Korean 782 – Washing Dishes (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 772-773 – ex-President Park Geun-Hye.
Update: ex-President Park Geun-Hye is currently in prison
Korea’s new President, Park Geun-Hye, had her inauguration today at the National Assembly building on Seoul’s Yeouido (island) alongside 77,000 selected citizens and politicians. The post-inaugural parade took her to Gwanghwmun Plaza in northern Seoul and finally to the nearby capitol building, Cheong Wa Dae. This is a return to the Blue House for Park since she already lived there for 15 years as the daughter of the late President Chung-Hee. She was also promoted to the post of First Lady for five years, following the assassination of her mother in 1974. Interesting fact: President Park holds a bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering (1974) and can speak five languages.
Vocabulary:
President – 대통령 daetong-nyeong
Park Geun-Hye – 박근혜Korea Times links: (in English and Korean)
Inauguration Day ceremony
Park Geun-Hye’s Speech - Easy to Learn Korean 781 – Washing the Dishes
- Easy to Learn Korean 780 – Grammar-Punctuation (Part Two)
- Easy to Learn Korean 779 – Grammar-Punctuation
Practice speaking Korean and punctuation!
Apple’s Voice dictation is a fun way to practice speaking Korean. Korean is available on your iPhone or iPad; enable it from the menu: Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards > Choose Add New Keyboard.To Use:
Open Notes, Email, Messages or any program that supports voice dictation. Press the globe icon in the lower left to toggle languages to enable Korean. Next, press the microphone icon (next to the spacebar) and start speaking in Korean.-Voice dictation recognizes spoken punctuation too. Try using the terms in this article and see if it can understand your pronounciation.
-You can also enable Siri to recognize spoken Korean for voice control. Settings > General > Siri > Language > Korean* (This is a bit more advanced, so practice simple dictation first.)
-Mac computers also have Voice Dictation built-in. Once enabled, press the (fn) key twice to begin and once to stop.
Support:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5176
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5449
*Ensure that you have an internet connection for both of these features. - Easy to Learn Korean 778 – Presidential Pardon
Korean Presidents are elected for a single 5-year term and Park Geun-Hye (박근혜) will take office as President on February 25, 2013. She is replacing exiting President Lee Myung-Bak (이명박). As do other world leaders, Korean Presidents frequently handout pardons before the leaving the Blue House.
- Easy to Learn Korean 538, 552 – Cold weather and staying warm
- Easy to Learn Korean 388, 391 – Hot water and heated floors
Easy to Learn Korean 388 & 391
The temperature is hovering around 0 degrees Celsius and I’m sure there are foreigners in Korea trying to figure out their hot water and apartment heating controls.Korean apartments are heated by a system of steel or copper water pipes coiled below the floor. This type of floor heating is unique to Korea and is called 온돌, which literally means hot stone. The modern heating system is derived from traditional houses which were built with a kitchen slightlty lower than the rest of the house. The smoke from the kitchen’s fire was channeled under a layer of stones placed beneath the floor. When heated, the stones became hot for extended periods of time. And since heat rises, they kept the air in the house warm. Today, all Korean apartments are built with an ondol heating system. Most Korean restaurants also offer a floor-seating section where patrons can feel the warmth from sitting on the floor.
For a Westerner, the ondol has many advantages but also presents a few challenges:
1. Since the floor is always hotter than the air, it can be uncomfortable to walk around your apartment. My feet always feel like they’re on fire.
2. Anything located near the floor will get hot. Be careful of the lowest shelf in cupboards. I have seen food melt or simply change in taste.
3. It’s really cold outside, so people tend to crank the heat up when they get home. It then becomes too hot and we end up having to opens the windows. The ondol takes longer to heat up the apartment than a traditional ventilation system and it also takes longer to cool down. You’ll have to play with the controls to find the balance that’s most suitable for you.
4. The controls are difficult and simply don’t make sense (see below, my apartment).Tips
-The controls are used for both the apartment hot water boiler and the (room) thermostat.
-The red LED display shows either the hot water temperature (floor) or the air temperature of the room, depending on which mode is selected. Most often, you’ll find that these two temperatures are not the same.
-The newest apartment may have a simpler control system, more like the ones found in the US.There are three basic control choices (choose one):
A. Hot Water OFF/Heated Floor OFF [POWER OFF, do not use this]
B. Hot Water ON/Heated Floor OFF
i. In this case, there are no options for temperature control
C. Hot Water ON/Heated Floor ON
i. Set the floor water temperature
ii. Set the room air temperatureWe’ve been told to use the floor temperature controls (Choice C,i) and not the room temperature controls (Choice C,ii) as they’re more efficient. This seems to make sense since the heat for the air comes from the floor.
-There’s also a timer option that can be used together with either of Choice C, but we’re already confused enough. ^^
-Never completely turn off the power to these controls. During the winter, the water pipes can freeze and burst from the expanding cold water. And since the pipes are located below the floor, they’re expensive to fix or replace. When you’re not going to be home, especially for extended periods of time, you can turn off the apartment heat while leaving the hot water boiler on.
http://tinyurl.com/EasyKorean388
http://tinyurl.com/EasyKorean391