Korean vocabulary is key to understanding the bulk of Korean language. Without enough words in your bank, it makes Korean sound fast and impossible to decode.
Often times, you could be one word away to fully understanding a sentence. And it would be awesome if your memory can give you that Korean word when you need it at the right time.
But given the sheer amount of vocabulary you need to master, how can you remember everything the more you learn new words?
Just as importantly, how do you make sure that you won’t forget and lose the words you’ve worked hard to learn?
1. Focus On The Most Frequent Words
To master Korean vocabulary, you don’t need to cram the entire Korean dictionary. You just need enough words to understand normal conversations.
That’s where the most commonly used words come in.
These words will make up majority of the text when you’re reading, or majority of the words you hear while listening. So if you establish these words in your memory as soon as possible, then you can understand more sentences in conversations.
For instance, common tangible words such as car, coffee, and dog are more useful in conversations than industrialization, clarity, or network. They’re vivid and easier to picture in your mind.
You might be wondering how many Korean words you should begin with when starting out. Like I said, you don’t need to cram a lot of words. I’d say target an amount that is:
- Not too much that you end up studying too quickly
- Not too little that you make too slow of a progress
For instance, you can discover words related to food and drinks. You can learn some verbs to express what you’re currently doing, You can try out some adjectives to describe objects in your surroundings. Even learn the Korean numbers in order to count!
Because these words are commonly used, it’s okay to spend 2x, 5x, or even 10x more time in order to master them. It won’t be time wasted because they will appear everywhere when you’re reading text or listening to conversations.
Put in another way, you can think of it as the 80/20 Rule in language learning and vocabulary: 20% of words make up 80% of the conversation. Assuming you need 10,000 words to become fluent in Korean, then roughly 2,000 of them are used more often.
If 2,000 words is too much, you can also assume that 20% of those 2,000 are even more common. That trims the list down to 400 words – a manageable number for any beginner learner.
The key is deciding which words (or category of words) to begin learning first. Some common categories of words you can begin with include:
- People
- Food/Drink
- Transportation
- Items in the House
- Clothes
- Buildings
- Animals
- Weather
- Numbers
- Time/Calendar
- Verbs
- Adjectives
- Emotions
Another approach is to simply pick up a YouTube video on the most frequent words in Korean. I prefer going with video so that you can read the word while also hearing its sound, which train both your eyes and ears at the same time.
2. Break Down Korean Words Into Parts
Many Korean words are formed by combining smaller words.
As an example, 화산, the Korean word for volcano, is made up of 화 meaning fire, and 산 meaning mountain. 노래방, the Korean word for a singing room or karaoke, is composed of 노래 meaning song, and 방 meaning room. 술집 refers to a bar where one drinks alcohol. 술 is the Korean of alcohol, while 집 refers to house.
In English, you wouldn’t use the words “fire mountain”, “song room”, or “alcohol house” in conversations – you instead use volcano, karaoke, and bar because these words are simpler.
In Korean, you get to skip learning these new words. As you learn more through study, you’ll discover this pattern more often.
- 꽃잎 means petal (꽃 is flower, 잎 is leaf, literally the leaf of a flower)
- 벽돌 means brick (벽 is wall, 돌 is rock, literally a rock in the wall)
- 사거리 means intersection (사 is 4, 거리 is road, literally a converging point where 4 roads meet)
- 공책 means notebook (공 is zero, 책 is book, literally a book with nothing in it)
- 화나다 means angry (화 is fire or anger, 나다 is to grow or appear, literally means growing in anger)
- 미국 사람 means American (미국 is America, 사람 is person, literally a person from America),
- 앞머리 means forehead (앞 is front, 머리 is head, literally the front of your head)
Notice how you’re not really learning anything new – you just connect words you already know which in English would translate to a new word.
With this method, you could discover and solidify a sizeable amount of Korean vocabulary into your memory.
3. Familiarize the Sound of Words
Learning how a new word sounds like improves your ability to remember the word. Your ears can help assist your eyes in registering the new word.
Instead of just looking at a list and trying to memorize what’s written, partner it with the corresponding correct sound to enable simultaneous processing in both eyes and ears.
Korean often has sounds that don’t exist in English, such as ㅡ, 의, ㄹ, as well as “batchims” that change the ending sounds of Korean characters. These can’t be learned by relying on English romanizations, so you must use your ears to welcome the strange nuances of the language.
If you can do this early on, you’ll find that it would speed up your learning of future words and would help immensely in your immersion.
4. Connect Every New Word You Learn
If you try to learn new words in isolation, most of them won’t solidify into your memory. You’ll forget them overnight.
Conversely, if you take the time to connect them to as much information as possible – even if it means having to slow down – that would turn out to be a better investment of your time.
The key to making associations is to make them as rich as possible. You do this by learning information in multiple formats:
- Using it to form sentences in conversations
- Hearing the sound of the word
- Seeing an image of the word
- Feeling the word whenever possible
- Watching the word in motion through videos
- Relating it to previously known words
- Spelling the word by saying or writing it
- Learning the translation of the word
- Determining the word’s origin
- Deconstructing the word (which works well in Korean)
At the very least, new vocabulary has to connect with something in your brain. Otherwise, you may find your new words drifting away as soon as you learn it. The more you can connect, the longer they’ll stay in your head.
5. Recall The Words You Learned
Recalling vocabulary is one of the best things you can do to make sure you don’t forget information. It’s actually common sense: you need to recall Korean words when you need to use them.
Any form of connection you establish (using the methods above) won’t be complete if you couldn’t bring up the word to the surface.
Recalling information is a form of self-testing that creates desirable difficulty, which if you overcome can vastly strengthen your memory. Think back to the times when you took a difficult test. Chances are, because your notes were closed, you pushed your memory to bring out the answers you need.
This is the kind of intensity we want to recreate when dealing with vocabulary.
Basically, anything you recall with closed notes (or with hints taken away) is an effective recall. However, one popular and established way to do it is by using a popular tool known as a spaced repetition system (SRS). It’s known for optimizing reviews such that fading words from your memory will show up right before you forget them.
What you can do is after taking a bunch of commonly used words and making the best connections, you input them into an SRS tool and let the tool run the algorithm for you. All you do then is to attend and be consistent with the review. Try it out, it works wonders.
How Do You Master Vocabulary?
Korean vocabulary carries its own challenges just like if you were learning any foreign language. Ultimately, we want to expand our word bank and be able to read more, listen more, and speak more.
As you consistently study Korean and do immersion, and given the right approach towards memorizing vocabulary, you will slowly build up the words. And before you know it, you’re in full swing.
So how do you master Korean vocabulary to avoid forgetting it? Let me know in the comments below.
