Essential Korean Before You Go to Korea ๐ŸŒŸ โ‘ฃ MANNERS (๋งค๋„ˆ) โ€” Polite Korean that opens doors ๐ŸŒธ

Golden polite set

  • ์•ˆ๋…•ํ•˜์„ธ์š” / ๊ฐ์‚ฌํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค / ์ฃ„์†กํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค / ์‹ค๋ก€ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค
  • ์ž ์‹œ๋งŒ์š”. โ€” One moment.
  • ํ˜น์‹œ โ€ฆ ๊ฐ€๋Šฅํ•˜์‹ค๊นŒ์š”? โ€” Would it be possible toโ€ฆ?
  • ๊ดœ์ฐฎ์œผ์‹œ๋ฉด ์ด๋ ‡๊ฒŒ ํ•ด๋„ ๋ ๊นŒ์š”? โ€” If itโ€™s okay, may I do it like this?
  • ๋จผ์ € ํ•˜์„ธ์š”. โ€” Please go ahead.
  • ์ž˜ ๋ถ€ํƒ๋“œ๋ฆฝ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. โ€” I look forward to your kind help.

Honorific sprinkles

  • ๋ถ„ (person, honorific), ๋“œ์‹œ๋‹ค/์ฃผ๋ฌด์‹œ๋‹ค (eat/sleep), ๋“œ๋ฆฌ๋‹ค (to give, humble)
  • Offer/receive items with two hands; a small nod + โ€“์š” ending = instant kindness.

Tiny situational lines

  • ์ž๋ฆฌ ์žˆ์–ด์š”? jari isseoyo? โ€” Do you have seats?
  • ์ถ”์ฒœ ๋ฉ”๋‰ด๊ฐ€ ์žˆ์„๊นŒ์š”? โ€” Any recommendations?
  • ์‚ฌ์ง„ ์ฐ์–ด ์ฃผ์‹ค ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์„๊นŒ์š”? โ€” Could you take a photo, please?

Quick drill: write a 3-line polite request using ํ˜น์‹œ / โ€ฆ ์ฃผ์„ธ์š” / ๊ฐ์‚ฌํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Handy cheatsheet (save me!) ๐Ÿ“Œ

  1. ์ด๊ฑฐ ํ•˜๋‚˜ ์ฃผ์„ธ์š”. ํฌ์žฅํ• ๊ฒŒ์š”. โ€” One of this, to-go.
  2. ์–ผ๋งˆ์˜ˆ์š”? ์นด๋“œ ๋ผ์š”? โ€” How much? Card okay?
  3. ์•„๋ฉ”๋ฆฌ์นด๋…ธ ๋‘ ์ž”์ด์š”. โ€” Two Americanos.
  4. ์—ฌ์„ฏ ์‹œ ์˜ˆ์•ฝํ–ˆ์–ด์š”. โ€” I have a 6 oโ€™clock reservation.
  5. ํ˜น์‹œ ์กฐ๊ธˆ๋งŒ ๊ธฐ๋‹ค๋ ค ์ฃผ์‹ค ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์„๊นŒ์š”? ๊ฐ์‚ฌํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. โ€” Could you wait a moment, please? Thank you.

ย Mini quiz (answers at the bottom ๐Ÿ˜‰)

  1. Which system for 15 minutes: SINO or NATIVE?
  2. โ€œWe are four peopleโ€ โ†’ ______ ๋ช…์ด์—์š”.
  3. โ€œRoom 1205โ€ in Korean numbers?
  4. โ€œLess spicy, pleaseโ€ in Korean?
  5. Polite way to ask for a recommendation?

Answers: 1) SINO (๋ถ„) 2) ๋„ค ๋ช… 3) ์ฒœ์ด๋ฐฑ์˜ค ํ˜ธ 4) ๋œ ๋งต๊ฒŒ ํ•ด ์ฃผ์„ธ์š” 5) ์ถ”์ฒœ ๋ฉ”๋‰ด๊ฐ€ ์žˆ์„๊นŒ์š”?

Learn smarter, faster โœจ

Start with Ordering โ†’ SINO โ†’ NATIVE โ†’ Manners. Practice out loud, record yourself, and aim for one full Korean interaction per day on your trip. Want this as a cute printable or a 20-min mini-lesson? DM โ€œESSENTIAL KOREANโ€ and Iโ€™ll send it over!

Leave a comment