During these days in quarantine, the lessons with Mallory and I’s language partner, Jannette, have been a little different than in the past. We have been meeting on Zoom. Although our weekly little story time lesson from the book Jannette would bring along to every lesson isn’t one we can continue online, Jannette has been so creative in her teaching style. She has been using different functions like whiteboard on Zoom, screenshare, and creating a shared google folder and document so we can have a record of everything we learned.
As Mallory and I looked over our learning plans, we realized talking about time is something we both had that we hadn’t got to yet. We started with learning the days of the week, as all the days have been feeling like a Saturday. Korean is similar to English in respect to the days of the week. As in English, each day of the week has the word “day” attached to the end like in “Sunday.” The days of the week in Korean are:
Monday -월요일 - Wur-yoil
Tuesday - 화요일 - Hwa-yoil
Wednesday - 수요일 - Soo-yoil
Thursday - 목요일 - Mog-yoil
Friday - 금요일 - Geum-yoil
Saturday - 토요일 - To-yoil
Sunday - 일요일 - Ee-ryoil
The ending on all the words are 요일(yoil) which means “day” as suspected. However, in Korean this is specifically used to denote the days of the week. To actually just say day, not in respect to the days of the week in particular, it is just 일(il). The hardest day of the week to get up for and the hardest day to pronounce are both Monday for me. The ㄹ character is a really hard one to get down. I had a lot of trouble with Sunday initially too but as I kept on using it, it isn’t so bad. I will need to try a little harder to get the hang of Monday as well. The cool thing is that each day of the week has special meaning like 월 means moon, 화 means fire, 수 means water, 목 means tree, 금 means gold, 토 means earth, and 일 means sun. This is awesome to know because it’s double the vocabulary at once! The last one, 일, is a direct translation to english which is pretty interesting!
After learning the days of the week, we went into the calendar system in Korean. So a cool realization Jannette told us about was how months and moon in Korean are both 달 (dal). To say calendar it is 달력(dallyeog). Then, the popular whipped coffee trend of dalgona coffee also has the same 달(dal) beginning. I wondered if 달고나(dalgona) meant something related to the moon or day, however the google searches were not very helpful as it was directly saturated with all the articles on the Tik Tok coffee trend.
Before learning the actual months, we went over the Korean counting system, which there are two of, which definitely complicates things. This goes back to the origin of Korean because Korea and China have a long history. This number system is known as the Sino-Korean numbers system and has roots in Chinese numbers. However, the awesome thing we learned about it is that in order to learn every number, you only need to memorize 18 numbers and the others can be created with combinations of them. The other number system is the Native Korean way. The basics are listed below where in the middle is the Sino-Korean system and on the right is the Native Korean system.
1=일=하나, 2=이=둘, 3=삼=셋, 4=사=넷, 5=오=다섯, 6=육=여섯, 7=칠=일곱, 8=팔=여덟, 9=구=아홉, 10=십=열, 11=십일=열하나, 12=십이=열둘, 13=십삼=열셋, 20=이십, 30=삼십, 40=사십, 100=백,
130=백삼십
I have heard the counting system is hard to understand, not because of the two types but rather when to use which. I wanted to count to 30 for my goal in my learning plan. It’s nice that the goal wasn’t as difficult to learn as I imagined. During the summer, I want to work to use the number system in different contexts, such as when referring to a certain number of things in sentences.
From the numbers, we learned the months. Months is 월(wol) in Korean. This is where it gets pretty cool. So in Korean, months are said like 1 month=January, 2 month=February, and etc. Basically they don’t have an actual word for each month. However, placing the number for one, using the Sino-Korean number system, with the 월 ending, implies month. However, it is written as 1월=January. The Sino-Korean number system comes into play when you are saying it out loud, so it would be 1월=January=일월= Eel-wol.
These past weeks were a ton of useful information! I have been working on trying to integrate them in my days by saying the day, date, and month every day when I set myself up to do homework. For counting numbers, instead of counting sheep like I sometimes like to do in order to fall asleep, I have been counting in Korean. Sometimes, I end up forgetting some numbers so I end up looking at my print out of what number is. This has been extremely helpful in using what I have learned, even if I end up talking to myself, haha!
Replies
Hi Priyanka, thank you for your sharing! I'm also confused about the counting system, especially when it combines with the age system. And since I'm from China, the pronunciation of one part the Sino-Korean counting system is very similar to that of current Cantonese therefore it is not hard for me to learn it. However, it is still very interesting to know that there are two counting systems existing in Korean and I've recently learned that the native system is used not for accuracy but only for numbers smaller than 100. I always wonder why this is the thing. Again, thanks for the sharing!
When I am reading a few articles with my language partner that included a lot of numbers and the way it read in the 일 이 삼 system and the other system 하나 둘 셋 system seemed random. But then we realized that the 하나 둘 셋 system had meaning in the number like 1st place, and the 일 이 삼 represented phone numbers, %, purely numerical.
Hi Priyanka,
Numbers in Korean were always tricky to me when I learned them for the first time. The fact that there are two different systems used for different situations was beyond little Ellie's brain (sometimes my current brain too). As you said, this goes back to the usage of Hanja, or Chinese characters, with the Korean language. Your questioning about the word 달고나 and 달 prompted me to look it up as well! According to the Naver Dictionary, 달고나 is a 신어 = a newly coined term. So it doesn't have the same hanja application as the 달 for moon/month 月(달 월). I hope this eased some curiosity.