Let's Learn Korean - Vocabulary list

Total words: 230

I don’t like to post questions here so much, but I can’t seem to find this one. I’m looking for a good, comprehensive list of everyday Korean vocabulary so I can pick through and make my own vocab flash-cards.

I’ve got a few resources (appendix from Roadmap to Korean, lesson-by-lesson Vocab. on Sogang’s Korean language study), but they’re a bit incomplete - I’m very internet based, so anyone know an online resource like that? 강미’s “Vocabulary” section is all quizzes which would be great as a study tool, but not what I’m looking for now. Her “Repertoire” is the basic idea, but as yet not complete either. I guess the most comprehensive thing would be a dictionary, but I’m not about to pick through the dictionary on my own trying to choose the most “everyday” words.

If there’s not a resource out there, maybe I can make one of my own. I’ve given up on making computer-based flash-cards...handwritten is much more useful for me because I remember what I write better than what I type.

What would be great would be common words with clear definitions and an example sentence or two. If I don’t understand a word, I can’t remember it. Common conjugations on the verbs/adjectives would be great too~
Also, I’d love to see a list of all the exact synonyms in Korean (반말/높인말) - for example, 먹다/드시다.

Posted by ㄴㅇㄷㅇ ㅠㅇㅜㅌ on Tuesday Dec 7, 2004 in Korean Writing | |

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

The trackback URL for this entry is:

트랙백:

Hey 필립,

I understand what you mean. I was in search of a similar thing when I started studying Korean - like wouldn’t “1000 most common words in Korean” be a great idea for a book ? But as we all know there is precious little written for English speakers starting to learning Korean - esp in the area of vocab. Anyway, here’s a few of my tips for increasing vocab.

There is a book titled :

“Handbook of Korean Vocabulary” - A resource for word recognition and comprehension. Written by Mihn Choo & William O’Grady and published by University of Hawaii Press.

This book is not a dictionary, but a ‘root’ dictionary, in that it sets out common Hanja (listed in 한글 alphabetical order) and then expands each one to show the way various common words are constructed using that Hanja ... if that makes sense

The good thing is that you don’t have to learn Hanja to use it. In short, it can help take out some of the rote memorisation of vocab - because as you see for yourself how many of the words are formed, you can remember them a lot more easily. Also, because you learn multiple words at once, it can increase your vocab pretty quickly.

There is also a seperate section with Native Korean Origin Roots.

an example from the book :

root 고 (高) high
최고 - the highest; the best (최 - 最 the most)
고급 - high quality; advanced level (급 - 級 grade)
고등 - high; advanced (등 - 等 grade) eg 고등학교 -
high school
고층 - a high rise (층 - 層 story) eg 고층건물 - high rise building
고속 - high speed (속 - 速 speed) eg 고속도로 - freeway; 고속버스 - express bus
고온 - high temperature (온 - 溫 temp)
고기압 - high atmospheric temp (기압 - 氣壓 atmospheric temp)
고혈압 - high blood pressure (혈압 - 血壓 blood pressure)
잔고 - the balance (in an account) (잔 - 殘 remainder)
etc ...

If you are interested - and I do think it is a great resource, it’s available at 교보문고 for 13,000원 - it’s easy to spot with a bright blue/red cover.

Secondly, if you are interested, I have all the the vocab from the Yonsei grammar books 1 to 6 and the Yonsei readers 1 to 6 (I took them from the vocab in the back of each book and from handout sheets from level 1)

For books 1 & 2 the lists have english translations. From book 3, I tried to learn the Korean meaning in Korean ... hahaha - easier said than done, so dont have the translations, but I am happy to supply.

I think that these would make up a pretty good base for common words ? as there are about 650 words from book 1 alone.

Maybe we can make our own lists on this board, but I don’t know how I would post what I have, and whether them 왕음치 would be OK with that ? I mean I can scan the lists, and a few I have on disk. What do you think ?

OK, lastly, if you haven’t found this site yet, then go have a look.

**Note** the following site has some language that may be considered a little crass (no pics or anything, so dont worry ... haha)

It’s a Korean Slang Dictionary - nothing official, OK, so don’t take it too seriously, but it can be fun for a look.

http://www.geocities.com/idontevencarenomore/

Posted by ozzie on Tuesday Dec 7, 2004 at 03:49 PM
Wow Ozzie~!! Thanks a lot~ ^__^ I actually really want to learn 한자 as well, so that book sounds immesurably useful~

When you say “supply” for those vocab lists, what exactly do you mean? I assume it’s hard-copy, so are you suggesting we meet to trade off or do you want to scan and send it? In any case, I’m totally interested.

I think at one point in everyone’s language study, there is nothing else to do but sit down and methodically memorize vocab…

I find that all the resources out there for learning Korean start REALLY basic, and then hop up a level grammatically without bothering to teach you ANY of the vocabulary that they stick into the new grammar constructions, leaving you so busy trying to figure out what the sentence is all about that you miss the grammar point totally. Some of the computer-based programs give a translation if you mouse over, but that’s teaching too many things at one time, so you miss the vocab while trying to focus on the grammar point they’re teaching.

I can’t speak for 왕음치, but I think sharing/finding/creating/being learning resources is what this blog is all about, so I very seriously doubt anyone would have a problem creating something like what you’re talking about. The matter of formatting is something I am probably the least qualified around to address (my blog is still on just a basic Blogger template), but I’m all for learning~ I’ve got massive amounts of space on my personal site, and I don’t think space is an issue here, so that’s not a problem either~

On that note of formatting - any of you bloggers out there know good resources to learn more about web design - especially related to blogging? I’ve learned quite a bit from W3Schools.com, but the amount of information there gets overwhelming at times… I’ve got my own webspace, so the world’s my limit essentially.
Another problem I have is obtaining English-language programs here in Korea (I’d like to get Dreamweaver or something like that...).

너무 긴 댓글 - 미안해요~ ^^;;

Posted by ã„´ã…‡ã„·ã…‡ ã… ã…‡ã� on Tuesday Dec 7, 2004 at 04:26 PM
Hey 피립,

Yeah, no worries mate hehe ... 2 years at Yonsei left me with LOTS of study material, but, which due to the (crash) nature of the course left little time to absorb it all. I am in the process of sorting it out into some form of coherent reference library. 한국말을 공부하기가 끝없죠 ?

Yeah, you are right about there being little in the middle between the very basic stuff and the advanced reagrding vocab. My teachers told me that they taught grammar, as this needed to be explained in detail, but words can be looked up in a dictionary by yourself. Thats all well and good, but can be hit and miss, as the learner has a hard time picking what is useful for their level. But as I said, that book, is a good resource, and, even better, you DONT have to know or learn 한자 for it to be of use.

But in contrast, and IMHO I think as uninteresting as the Yonsei books are, the vocab the books build is pretty well structured, in that the lists from the first 2 books will give a pretty good grounding in the common required vocab for Korean.

I did a quick check, and I have the 1st book’s list only in hard copy (some sheets are a little dog eared) and the 2nd book (most of it anyway) in Word format on disk. I am happy to scan and send to you, or post them here, or your web site. But I am off to Hong Kong tommorow, and thus cant do this till next week. Maybe 왕음치 can advise on whether he is interested in putting up these (or part there of) in the vocab section. I format up however is required. As I said, each book has about 650 words.

저도 너무 긴 댓글을 붙어서 미안합니다.

Posted by ozzie on Tuesday Dec 7, 2004 at 05:36 PM
오늘은 시간이 없고 빨리 붙이고 싶은데 영어로 많이 써서 미안합니다. 필립 씨 - 지난번 포스트에 이름이 철자를 잘못 써서 죄송합니다.

Posted by ozzie on Tuesday Dec 7, 2004 at 06:08 PM
Ozzie, I agree that vocab book is very helpful. I have a copy of a copy from when you couldn’t find it in Korea - only last year did I see it in the bookstores.

I am interested in that list(s), if you send them to me: eslteacher@gmail.com I will post them here for download and may even make an html page for online viewing. You can send them to me in rtf doc or any format. If you can make high quaility scans of your hard copies I should be able to OCS them into word.

Earlier Orankay said that he was going to post a list of the 5,000 most common Korean words. He hasn’t yet, but hopefully soon.

------
Resident Geek and EFL specialist -
Living & teaching in Korea since 1997
--------------------
EFL GEEK | 한국어 연습장

Posted by Sean. on Tuesday Dec 7, 2004 at 06:34 PM
A list of 5,000 Korean morphemes sorted in a few different ways can be found ☞ here It is in HWP format, so you’ve got to get a reader to see it. (I suppose we could paste the contents here, but I don’t think that’s what ANYBODY wants. If it doesn’t work for you, email me and I’ll send it in Excel format). If you take a few minutes to look at it, you’ll find that a good portion of this stuff is not easily vocabulary listable. For example, item number 2 is “하” as in “하다,” but “하” by itself is not so useful. Someone else has done a considerably shorter, but still heavy, list of vocab items ☞ here.

Also, FYI, it uses those funky newish Korean words for the parts of speech.

Posted by ë§ˆì?µ on Tuesday Dec 7, 2004 at 11:35 PM
I have started creating a set of picture flashcards myself. They are not the most common words, but some of them are.

I made them in Microsoft Publisher 2004, so you will need that to view and print them. I bought pre-cut system cards from the store and printed directly on them.

I will be adding to them regulary to build a library of flashcards…

http://www.koreanadoptees.org/uploads/downloads/flashcards.zip

Posted by ê¹€íƒœí˜• on Tuesday Dec 7, 2004 at 11:52 PM
Wow - looks like there’s some good stuff out there...too bad I can’t see any of it... What opens HWP? (Is that the 한글 program?) Anyone know where I could get my hands on a compy of Microsoft Publisher 2004?

Posted by ã„´ã…‡ã„·ã…‡ ã… ã…‡ã� on Wednesday Dec 8, 2004 at 12:10 AM
Mike,
I converted the files to .doc files and you can download file1: MSword (3mb) - pdf (1.5mb) & file2 MSword (7mb) - pdf (1.4mb).

김태형 It’s nice to find other people who use MSpublisher one of the greatest layout programs around. I’m curious why you made each flash card as a seperate file rather than just creating one big file. If you have it as one big file I would’ve converted it to pdf so everyone can share, but it will take to long to do it individually.

Philip, if you want to open hwp files check out my entry on EFL Geek about that. Publisher is bundled with office 2003 - You should be able to find a copy at Yongsan.

Mike, if you email me the excel file, I’ll upload it here as well - just reply to one of your comment notifications. I’ll probably set up a download area soon.

------
호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Wednesday Dec 8, 2004 at 12:37 AM
김태형씨, I like your flashcards. The photos are so interesting. But 호두 is walnut not wallet.

Posted by ë§ˆì?µ on Wednesday Dec 8, 2004 at 01:53 PM
I thot I posted a comment at an earlier post not titled Vocabulary List but where Philip had mentioned flashcards but now I can’t find that comment of mine. There are 15 PDF files of vocab flashcards at one of the pages of Indiana University Korean learning page but I’ve lost the URL myself.

I’ve been scrapping together the thematic vocab from http://www.interedu.go.kr and I’ll email the 56-page Word file to both Sean and Philip. Hopefully the softcopy means either or both of you can manipulate and re-configure the contents.

I downloaded the PDF file Sean had converted from Mike’s contribution but could NOT open it. Sigh !

Posted by HuangSY on Thursday Dec 9, 2004 at 06:00 PM
Thanks for the file HuangSY. I’m a bit busy this weekend (going snowboarding~!!! ^^), but I’ll see if I can play with it a bit~ I’ve been plagued with viruses ever since I got this computer, and reformatting the hard drive left me without Microsoft Office, so at home I only have WordPad to play around with for now. I’m heading to ì„œìš¸ tomorrow, so maybe I can pick up a copy (along with Publisher) when I’m there.

Mike - on that list of morphemes...I’m a bit (totally) lost as to what it is exactly I’m looking at~ I get the feeling that it’s not extremely useful at my level now, but could be very useful when I already have a good Vocabulary base. Am I passing it off too quickly without giving it a chance? The lack of English tells me that it’s not meant really for beginners… I am awaiting Ozzie’s return from Hong Kong - sounded his materials were best suited for my level~
And to the comment: “Also, FYI, it uses those funky newish Korean words for the parts of speech.” - anyone know what those funky newish Korean words are and what they mean?

Posted by ã„´ã…‡ã„·ã…‡ ã… ã…‡ã� on Thursday Dec 9, 2004 at 09:33 PM
Huang,

What version of acrobat reader are you using? I may have set compatibility to 6.0 instead of 5.0, try downloading it to your harddrive instead of opening it in your browswer and then open it, that may help.

Philip, personally I don’t put much stock in vocabulary lists or memorization in general. There is very little research that shows it to be an effective learning method. Sure, it works for a few learners, but not enough to be statistically meaningful. If you find the list useful great, if not I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

------
호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Thursday Dec 9, 2004 at 10:10 PM
Do you have another suggestion 왕음치? The problem I have is that I know sentence structure, I know basic grammar - I’ve got all that stuff down pretty well, but I simply don’t know most of the words people use. I don’t know another way to get past this plateau aside from just sitting down with a list and memorizing…

Posted by ã„´ã…‡ã„·ã…‡ ã… ã…‡ã� on Thursday Dec 9, 2004 at 11:33 PM
Exposure exposure exposure. The problem with memorization is that you usually forget it with in 1-3 days. Memorizing will work but the key is to keep the number of words down to 5 or less per day and then use them over and over and over.

Personally I put a lot of stock in reading as a key to building vocabulary. That is how you learn vocabulary in your first language. The trouble as adults is that, in Korean, it is hard to find graded readers that are interesting. Yonsei has a set, but they are incredibly boring which is demotivating.

------
호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Thursday Dec 9, 2004 at 11:42 PM
Philip,

It appears I was less than clear. I apologize.

Everyone appeared to be looking for a list of voacabulary items, and 왕음치님 mentioned a list of 5,000 of the most common vocabulary items in Korean (as determined by statistically examining a whole pile of texts). I posted a link to that list, but tried to point out that it’s a list of 5,000 morphemes, not 5,000 vocabulary words--so I didn’t think it would be that useful. Because that list was not so useful, I also posted a link to a list of the most common several thousand vocabulary items (the second file). If you open the second file, it may look overwhelming because there is a huge amount of information about where it came from, how it was generated, statistical analysis, etc., etc. Since all you really wanted was a vocabulary list, skip straight to the list (when I open the word file above, it starts on page 57). I think the list is pretty unmistakeable. Each item has an ID number, then the vocabulary item, then the part of speech that it is. This is followed by 8 columns of different statistical information that is probably not so useful. The list is in 가나다순.

As for the “funky Korean words,” there are two series of Korean words to describe parts of speech. For example:
Noun_____명사_____이름씨
Verb_____동사_____움직씨
Adj/vb___형용사___그림씨
...

The left column are Chinese-based terms and the right hand column are pure Korean. (It appears that there was originally a system based on the Chinese terms (most likely through Japanese). Some ultra-nationalist came along and decided that there was a need for a pure Korean system to replace this.) Now, helpfully, you can find both in use! ^^

왕음치, I send the Excel file to you a few days ago. Did you receive it?

Posted by ë§ˆì?µ on Thursday Dec 9, 2004 at 11:43 PM
Reading’s a good idea that I hadn’t thought about in a formal kinda way...I always chat with Korean friends, so I get a lot of vocab that way, but quite a bit of it is 채팅말 and it’s all 반말, so it can be a bit confusing at times… Can anyone suggest an interesting really easy Korean book? I’ve picked up a few children’s books here and there…
Actually, when I say “memorizing” a vocabulary list, it’s more of a finally remembering that word that I’ve heard 20 times but never remember what it means kinda thing…

Thanks a lot for the explanation Mike. I was lost on all those 씨’s...thought it was talking about Mr/Mrs. something-or-other (Mrs. Name, Mr. Drawing). That’s news to me - I’ve only heard of 명사/동사.

Posted by ã„´ã…‡ã„·ã…‡ ã… ã…‡ã� on Thursday Dec 9, 2004 at 11:59 PM
필립, 애니타임! ^^

근데 어느 스키장에 가는 건가요? 갔다와서 설질에 대한 update 해줄 거죠?

Posted by ë§ˆì?µ on Friday Dec 10, 2004 at 12:27 AM
당근이지~
Adventure Korea랑 대명비발디파크 가~ (홍천, 강원도)

Posted by ã„´ã…‡ã„·ã…‡ ã… ã…‡ã� on Friday Dec 10, 2004 at 12:39 AM
Found it ! You don’t know the cheap thrill of being able to re-locate a lost URL !

Here’s the link to 15 PDF Vocab files (supposedly in flashcard format). This site is related to the series of 8 books titled “Integrated Korean ...”

Posted by HuangSY on Friday Dec 10, 2004 at 09:46 PM
cool link SY. a lot of transliterations in there which seem to be more for reading practice than anything else, but good recap on words i’ve learnt before.

Posted by tanstaafl on Saturday Dec 11, 2004 at 01:51 PM
hi im jenny!!!

Posted by jenny on Monday Mar 14, 2005 at 08:00 PM
hi to everyone!!there!!!

Posted by jung su on Monday Mar 14, 2005 at 08:03 PM
In 2003, the Korean Language Academy posted a list of several thousand basic words, in both Word and Excel format (http://www.korean.go.kr/000_new/50_roll_pds.htm#, go to page 3, postings 50 and 51). I couldn’t believe it when I found it, as I’d been searching for exactly such an authoritative list for years. The criterion for inclusion are not *exactly* word frequency, but appears to be whether the list’s compiler judged the word to be important enough to know or not. Each word is listed together with its frequency ranking, 한자 (where applicable), part of speech, and disambiguating meaning, where necessary. There are some odd omissions--이렇게 is in the list but 그렇게 is not, for example--but all in all, it’s the best resource I’ve found, by a country mile.

Posted by sewing on Friday Apr 1, 2005 at 06:59 AM
Oh, and I forgot to add: each word is also assigned a letter ("A," “B,” or “C") to indicate its overall importance: A words are more critical to know than B words, and so on. *And* a bonus is that the list includes 조사 (which don’t always show up in vocab lists, it seems) and some important proper nouns (서울, 종로, 경상도, ...). What more could you ask for?

Posted by sewing on Friday Apr 1, 2005 at 07:03 AM
...Some more notes: if you click on the link to the post, there’s a short explanation of the file. It says there 982 “A” words, 2111 “B” words, and 2872 “C” words for a total of 5,965. Words followed by superscript numbers refer to the 표준 국어 대사전, available online (http://www.korean.go.kr/000_new/50_dic_search.htm#). Words are identified by the following parts of speech: 감탄사 (interjections), 고유 명사 (proper nouns), 관형사 (determiners), 대명사 (pronouns), 동사 (verbs), 명사 (nouns), 보조 용언 (auxiliary verbs and adjectives), 부사 (adverbs), 분석 불능 (derived forms), 수사 (numbers), 의존 명사 (dependent nouns), and 형용사 (adjectives). To download the file itself, of course, right-click on the filename, choose “Save Target As...” etc. And it isn’t in Word format, it’s actually a text file, but it would be best to open it Word (unless you’re using Korean Windows) and convert it to Korean (Word 2000 running on Windows 2000 does this, at least...).

Posted by sewing on Friday Apr 1, 2005 at 07:24 AM
YES! That’s it, the list most will want to see, linked there from sewing comment #24.

That list is based on the NAKL’s list of the most 58, 437 words in Korean, about which I made a post last December.

As I noted then, the list of the msot frequent 58,437 is not exactly appropriate for new learners of the language. 어머니 places 106th in terms of frequency and 봄 places 972nd. So, so much for the list of 58,437 as far as most of us are concerned.

Sewing said something of the kind above, but yes, it certainly does look like the list for foreigners is based half on statistics (frequency) and foreign language teaching methodology, doesn’t it?

BTW, the publishing house Darakwon will be publishing a picture book of sorts for Korean learners, set to come out sometime in the summer, but I imagine it will be too basic to be of interest of most people here.

Posted by oranckay on Saturday Apr 9, 2005 at 03:46 PM
I really wish I could just write my own html instead of having to use the little buttons above the text writing area.

The link for the following paragraph from my comment above: “That list is based on the NAKL’s list of the most 58, 437 words in Korean, about which I made a post last December.”

Can be found here:

Posted by oranckay on Saturday Apr 9, 2005 at 03:50 PM
Orankay,

I fixed your links in both posts. Just for everyone’s information. You can use your own html. The buttons are for lazy people or people who cannot remember htmal. I regularly just type the html myslef. Whatever you type will show up in the preview box live as it will look when you submit your comment.

------
호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Saturday Apr 9, 2005 at 05:54 PM
I don’t know about links working in raw HTML, though: I’ve had some strange things turn up on the screen when I did a href=, etc. (brackets and quotes omitted so you can see what I typed).

Posted by sewing on Sunday Apr 10, 2005 at 04:24 AM
The buttons are for lazy people or people who cannot remember htmal

Correction. The buttons are necessary for people (like me) who know no HTML. :(

Posted by HuangSY on Monday Apr 11, 2005 at 03:47 PM
learning kerean

Posted by pari on Sunday Jul 1, 2007 at 06:53 PM
Dear Sir/Madam.

How are you?
I would like to download Korean vocabulary and also like to download Korean language learning.
Expecting of your kind cooperation in this regards.
Thanking you.
Tuheen Huq

Posted by Tuheen Huq on Monday Jul 2, 2007 at 06:22 PM
Declan Software have lots of lists of Korean words (with audio) that include the 1000 most frequently used Korean words.

See here:

http://www.declan-software.com/korean/wordfiles_korean.htm

under “1000 Most Common Korean Words”.

Posted by Peter on Monday Jul 21, 2008 at 09:09 PM