(Now, isn’t that just the kind of sappy title that so fits in with the spirit of this blog?)
As some long-time readers of this blog may know, I’ve been working on and off for years on a list of basic Korean vocabulary. To cut to the chase, this is to let everyone know that after over a year’s hiatus, I’m finally working on the list again. You can access the list’s main page here. I’m currently working from 가게 to 걔. It’s still early days, but once I’ve finished that page, I’ll move on to 거 and work forward from there to 힘차다.
This may seem like shameless self-promotion, but a few commenters have asked me from time to time when I would resume the list. But I’m just one humble blogger. The National Institute of the Korean Language’s basic vocabulary list (on which my list is based) was the culmination of a lot of research, and has already resulted in at least two published dictionaries. Another blogger has already completed his own version of the entire list. For more on the background story, read on…
Back in 2003, the National Institute of the Korean Language [국립 국어원; a.k.a. NAKL ("A" for "Academy," part of its former English name)] published a list of 5900+ words considered by the list’s compiler(s) to be essential words for Korean learners to know. It was the summary of years of research, and is modelled on similar practices in English, such as the core vocabulary concept that has been used in such works as (historically) Michael West’s 1953 General Service List of 2000 basic English words, and more recent efforts by, for example, Collins and Longmans to compile “defining vocabularies” of basic words for their ESL dictionaries. (Not to mention C.K. Ogden’s pre-WWII Basic English project, although there were problems with it–at least it was a start, though.)
Anyhow, before the aforementioned list came out [called the "한국어 학습용 어휘 목록" (Vocabulary List for Studying Korean)], I’d tried for years to find some kind of list of essential words to learn. Korean language-learning texts typically have vocabularies that are too short or selective–and often include relatively inessential words used for various exercises, at the expense of other basic words that don’t fit easily into the books’ lesson plans. On the other hand, open a Korean or Korean-English dictionary, and how does one even start to sort through the plethora of words to figure out what is essential to learn and what isn’t? This list was a wonderful contribution to the field of Korean language study, because it sets out a basic reference vocabulary, and quite honestly, it doesn’t seem to require much improvement.
As I have pursued studying the language with the list in the back of my mind (often looking up frequently read or heard words to verify that they’re in the list, or infrequent but conceptually basic words too, for that matter), I’ve become increasingly satifisfied that the list is really sufficient for getting a good start on attaining at least an intermediate-level vocabulary. Of course, merely learning vocabulary is useless–one must also know the grammar, usage, idioms, and which words go together with which other words–but thankfully, as each year passes, there are more and more decent developments in Korean langauge learning in these areas as well. The “KSL” field is still lacking a slough of decent texts, and a lot of native Korean pedagogy seems to treat “Korean for ‘foreigners’” as a specimen for exhibition and examination, but at least there’s a gradual movement in the right direction.
Since the list was first released, at least two dictionaries have been published based on it: the “외국인을 위한 한국어 학습 사전 ” (Learner’s Dictionary of Korean) and the Korean Essential Vocabulary 6000 for Foreigners. (The former is a weighty, meaty dictionary that looks to be well worth the expenditure, but I didn’t buy it when I saw it because I was looking for something pocket-sized—which it isn’t! The latter is apparently just a straight list, possibly (?) with English equivalents for entry words.) I would also be remiss if I did not mention that someone took my raw presentation of the list and ran with it (with my permission), and completed what I never did, at ezcorean.com.
Anyhow, all of this is by way of saying, that after letting my blog stagnate for well over a year, I am now actively working on the Korean vocabulary list that I’ve got on it. The entire list from 가게 to 힘차다 (minus proper nouns) has been up for a year (and previous versions for longer than that), but what I’m doing now is going through each entry, and adding pronunciation and conjugation information (as suitable), English parts of speech and brief translations, and links to the corresponding entries in the Naver online Korean and Korean-English dictionaries. [The former is based on the NAKL's quasi-official "표준 국어 대사전" (Dictionary of Standard Korean), on which the NAKL's vocabulary list is also based.]
It took a long time to come up with a format that was (a) sustainable (i.e., I wouldn’t give up on after a few words because it was taking up too much of my unpaid free time) and (b) that I liked. Years ago, I tried a couple of approaches to try to please readers, but then I got bogged down in trying to be all things to all people, and the whole project went nowhere fast. But now I’m doing it, goshdarnit, and I’ll keep at it until it’s done!
12 Comments
Is there a vocabulary list that is organized by frequency of use? That would be ideal for a Korean learner.
That’s true…
You’re doing good work there, sewing…
Like a breath of fresh air, your work and effort are just what I needed. Thank you.
Eunsung: The short answer is yes. If you go to the linked intro page and go to footnote 1 at the bottom of the page, a link there will take you to the NAKL’s Excel file version of the list. There’s a column in that file (the lefthand column) that indicates each word’s ranking in a frequency survey that was released in 2002 or 2003. E.g., word #1 is the most frequent word, and #10000+ the least frequent. (There are some words in between that are not in the basic vocabulary list, because even though they may be used with some frequency, they might be specialized words that learners do not need to go out of their way to know.) A few words don’t have rankings because they are common words, but for whatever reason didn’t show up in the source material that was used for the frequency survey. (When I dig up the blog post I did on that frequency survey, I’ll add a link to it here.)
Sanshinseon, Fred2: Thanks for your feedback!
Your first sentence says it all… I now know you look for the deeper meaning. I am a simple man. I’ve spent my whole life “fitting in”. Relax, we all “smile in the same language”. The quote is not mine.
Finally! Thanks.
Good.
I’m in a dictionary-lover circle.
There’re many words incorrectly correlated.
Some examples: 선고유에, 집행유예, 모과.
모과:
http://endic.naver.com/endic.n.....0&rd=s
It says 모과 is papaya.
But, you know papaya is,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaya
Oh, no. Wikipedia has wrong explanation to papaya at its prelude.
Refer to this I wrote, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.....vs._Papaya
선고유예:
http://endic.naver.com/endic.n.....0&rd=s
and go to PROBATION, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probation
It is more like 집행유예.
And 집행유예 at naver dictionary,
http://endic.naver.com/endic.n.....0&rd=s
It says “a suspended sentence”.
But, according to wikipedia, suspended sentence is 선고유예 in Korean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_sentence
If you are interested in correlating Korean-English legal terms, come here, http://law4u.net/wiki .
At this time, the site is humble.
I need a mediawiki expert.
Great! Not actively studying at the moment, but want to prevent further rapid deteriorattion. Thanks.
Eunsung (and anyone else who’s interested): The source file for the NAKL Vocabulary List is accessible from the NAKL’s website. Go to this page and navigate to post #50 (currently on page 5). Clicking on the post title ["한국어 학습용 어휘 목록 (엑셀 파일)"] will open up an intro page (that is translated on my blog), with a link to the file itself (”contents.xls”). Posts 51 and 52 are for text and Arae-A Hangul 97 versions of the file. (The text file is currently inaccessible.) Once you’ve downloaded and opened the Excel file, just sort the file on the left-hand column (”순위”) to get the words in order of ranking.
The original frequency survey itself that the ranking numbers come from is available from post #43 (currently on page 6) at the same location as above. Click on the post title ["현대 국어 사용 빈도 조사 결과 파일 (엑셀 파일)"], then click on the “freqdata.zip” link to download. The zip file opens up into a number of Excel workbooks…as I recall, there’s one for regular words, one for proper nouns, one for noun particles (가, 이, 는, 를, etc.), and one for verb and adjective endings. There’s a text version of the files at post #42, but it takes up too much memory—the Excel files are much faster to open, sort, search through, etc. Posts #40 and #41 have some related material on the survey (all in Korean, of course), in Arae-A Hangul 97 format.
Looking at the frequency data alone is not totally useful…the survey drew on a number of written and spoken sources for raw material, but not enough sources to get rid of anomalies. For example, there were a number of words of specialized political or economic jargon that came up high in frequency, because a lot of newspapers were used in the survey. On the other hand, oral sources were used for data for the spoken language, but the oral data was not heavily weighted, so words that come up a lot in speech but not in writing didn’t necessarily score very high in the frequency survey. Nevertheless, if you, say, selected the first thousand words, you couldn’t really go too wrong with treating it as a representative list of the most frequently used words.
Alternatively, the basic vocabulary list has another column (”등급”) that assigns each word the class of A, B, or C, with A being the most basic and essential to know. There are 982 “A” words, 2111 “B” words, and 2872 “C” words (for a total of 5965). Sorting on that column will give you the words sorted by class.
●~*: Thank you for your feedback. Fortunately, none of those words is* in the vocabulary list, but your warning will remind me to double-check that the Korean and English definitions match up!
경고를 주의해 드리고 잘못된 정기들을 조심할 겁니다.
(* Singular “is” agrees with “none,” which is the subject.)
If you want to build your Korean vocabulary, doing it in alphabetical order is not a very efficient way. Therefore, I would like to suggest the following dictionary, which organizes words and phrases by subject matter. If you are familiar Stephen Glazier’s “Word Menu” dictionary, you will know what I am talking about:
이진영의 동시통역기초사전 Korean-English Terminology for Beginners
The above link also shows a few sample pages from the dictionary.
One suggestion on how to use the dictionary is to study a particular section(for example, the chapter on Law) and then read newspaper and magazine articles or watch TV news segments on the subject to reinforce the vocabulary you learn.
The dictionary is a little expensive, but I think it is well worth it.
GBevers: I agree very much with the principle of learning words by their semantic categories rather than alphabetically. I have one such categorically-arranged Korean dictionary at home, in fact. I have written up categorized wordlists of my own in the past. Organizing this list into groups of words with related meanings would be a worthwhile and rewarding endeavour. But working with the list I have, a first step for me (the first step as it’s been for the last four years—a long first step!) has been to just get my head around the scope of the list by going through it methodically from ㄱ to ㅎ. The problem with categories—or rather, why I haven’t attempted such a project on a list of this size—is their arbitrariness: especially for abstract nouns, trying to decide whether they should go in this or that category. At least dealing with them in han’gŭl order is more cut-’n'-dry.