150 Common Korean Words for Beginners (with Hangul)

Before you start: Hangul and how Korean words work

The fastest thing you can do to make these Korean words stick is to read them in Hangul, the Korean alphabet, rather than leaning on the romanization. Hangul looks intimidating from the outside and turns out to be one of the friendliest writing systems in the world. It is an alphabet, not a set of thousands of characters, and the letters are built to match the shape of your mouth as you say them. Most learners can read basic Hangul after a weekend of focused practice, and once you can, the romanization in these tables becomes a backup rather than a crutch.

Why push you toward Hangul so early on a page about words? Because romanization only ever approximates Korean sounds, and a few of those sounds do not exist in English. If you memorize a word by its romanization, you memorize a slightly wrong version of it, and that wrong version is hard to correct later. Read the Hangul from the beginning and the spelling and the sound lock together in one memory. If you have not met the alphabet yet, start with our guide to the 한글 Korean alphabet (Hangul), then come back here and the words will make far more sense.

A quick note on how the tables are laid out. Each row gives you the Hangul first, then a romanization, then the English meaning. The romanization follows the common revised style you will see on Korean road signs and in most textbooks, though you will spot small differences between systems out there, so treat it as a pronunciation hint and trust the Hangul as the real spelling. Verbs and adjectives are given in their dictionary form, the plain base form you would look up, and we explain how those endings change once you actually speak in the next section.

One more thing worth knowing up front: Korean word order is different from English. A Korean sentence usually puts the verb at the very end, and the subject or topic often comes first with a small marker attached. So "I drink water" comes out closer to "I water drink." You do not need to master this to use the words below, but it explains why a Korean sentence can feel like it arrives back to front at first. Learn the words now, and the grammar that arranges them will slot in as you start building sentences.

Politeness levels: -yo, formal, and casual

Korean bakes politeness into the grammar itself, so the same idea can be said in a more or less polite way depending on who you are talking to. This is the single biggest thing that surprises new learners, and getting a rough feel for it early keeps you from accidentally sounding rude. You do not need the full system to start, just an awareness of three broad registers and when to reach for each.

The polite -yo level (your default)

The everyday polite level is marked most often by the ending 요, romanized as -yo. This is the register you use with most people: strangers, coworkers, shopkeepers, anyone older, and anyone you do not know well. Notice how many of the useful phrases in this guide end in -yo, from 주세요 (juseyo, please give me) to the polite version of nearly every verb. As a beginner, this is your safe default. If you keep the -yo on the end of what you say, you will sound polite and appropriate in almost every situation you meet as a visitor or a new learner.

The formal level (announcements and respect)

There is a more formal register, often ending in the shape you see in 감사합니다 (gamsahamnida, thank you) and in words that end in the syllables romanized as -mnida or -seumnida. You hear it in news broadcasts, announcements, the military, business presentations, and any setting that calls for extra respect or distance. You do not have to produce it much as a beginner, but you should recognize it, because some of the most common set phrases, like the formal thank you and sorry, are learned exactly as they are and used constantly.

The casual level, called banmal

Casual speech, 반말 (banmal), drops the polite -yo entirely. You use it only with close friends, people clearly younger than you, children, or family in the right relationships. Said to the wrong person, banmal sounds blunt or disrespectful, so as a learner you leave it alone until you understand the relationships around you. The broad, polite way of speaking is called 존댓말 (jondaenmal), and it is what you want to live in while you find your feet. The simple rule: when unsure, add the -yo and stay polite. Koreans will read your effort generously, and no one is offended by a learner being a touch too polite.

Greetings and essentials

Start here, because these are the words you will say within the first ten seconds of almost any interaction. The all-purpose greeting is 안녕하세요 (annyeonghaseyo), which works morning, noon, and night and with anyone. Its casual cousin 안녕 (annyeong) covers both hi and bye with friends. Notice that Korean has two different goodbyes depending on who is leaving: one for the person walking away and one for the person staying behind. You do not have to memorize the logic yet, just learn the pair as a set.

A few of these deserve a closer look. The word for yes, 네 (ne), does double duty as a general "I hear you" that Koreans sprinkle through conversation, a bit like nodding out loud. The two goodbyes trip up every beginner: use the "go well" one for the person leaving and the "stay well" one for the person staying, and if you both leave a place, you both say the "go well" version. And 감사합니다 (gamsahamnida) is worth drilling until it is automatic, because you will say thank you dozens of times a day in Korea and this formal version is always safe.

Polite expressions and everyday phrases

These are the connective tissue of real conversation, the little phrases that keep an exchange moving and buy you time while your beginner brain assembles a sentence. The star of the group is 주세요 (juseyo), which turns almost any noun into a polite request. Put a thing in front of it and you have asked for it: 물 주세요 (mul juseyo) is "water, please." That one pattern alone will carry you through cafes, restaurants, and shops.

Two phrases here are cultural fixtures worth using even when your Korean is otherwise thin. Before eating, people often say the "I will eat well" phrase, and after a meal the "I ate well" phrase, both a small thanks to whoever provided the food. And when someone finishes work or a task, the "thanks for your hard work" phrase acknowledges their effort. Sprinkle these in and you sound less like a phrasebook and more like someone who has actually spent time around the language.

Pronouns and pointing words

Korean pronouns come with a twist that is easy to state and important to remember: there are polite and casual versions of "I," and the humble, polite one is the version you use constantly, while the casual one is reserved for friends. English speakers also tend to overuse "you," and Korean does the opposite. The word for "you" is used far less than you would expect, because Koreans usually drop it, use the person's name, or use their title instead. Learn the pronouns below, but do not scatter "you" through your sentences the way you would in English.

The pointing words are more useful than the personal pronouns in daily life, honestly. This, that, and that-over-there, plus here, there, and over-there, let you shop, order, and ask for directions with almost no grammar. Point at a dish and say the word for "this" plus 주세요 (juseyo) and you have ordered lunch. Korean neatly splits "that" into two: one for something near the listener and one for something far from you both, which feels fussy until you notice how often it removes confusion about what you mean.

About the word for "you" in the tables: the formal one is used carefully, because in the wrong context it can sound cold or even confrontational. As a beginner, it is safer to learn people's names and titles, such as adding the respectful suffix romanized as -nim to a role, than to point a blunt "you" at someone older or senior. This is one of those places where Korean politeness lives inside the vocabulary itself.

Question words

Question words give a beginner a lot of reach for very little effort. With what, who, when, where, why, and how, you can keep a conversation alive even when your sentences are tiny, because a single question word plus a gesture often gets your meaning across. These six, plus how much and how many, belong in your first week of study.

The word for "how much," romanized as eolma, is the one every traveler reaches for first, because it asks the price of anything in a market or shop. Pair it with the numbers further down this guide and you can both ask a price and understand the answer. Note that Korean has a formal "what," mueot, and a relaxed spoken "what," mwo, and in everyday speech you will hear the shorter one far more often, so learn both and expect the casual version out on the street.

Common verbs

Verbs are where Korean sentences live, and they sit at the end of the sentence rather than the middle. The forms below are dictionary forms, the base you would look up. In real speech these endings change to carry tense and politeness, so the dictionary form is the root you build from rather than the exact thing you say. Even so, learning the base meanings now means that when you meet the polite and past forms, you already know the word underneath them.

A handful of these carry more than their weight. The verb for "to do," hada, attaches to countless nouns to make new verbs, so "study" plus hada means "to study" and "work" plus hada means "to work," which means one verb quietly gives you hundreds. The pair for "to exist" and "to not exist" also covers "to have" and "to not have," so they show up in an enormous range of sentences, from "is there a bathroom" to "I do not have money." Drill those three first and a lot of Korean opens up.

Notice the two verbs for knowing and not knowing are separate words rather than one word with a "not," which is common in Korean, where negation often has its own vocabulary. The same goes for liking and disliking. When you learn a verb, it is worth checking whether its opposite is a distinct word you should learn alongside it, because pairs like these are cheaper to remember together than apart.

Common adjectives

Here is a quirk that will save you confusion: Korean adjectives behave like verbs. The words for big, small, good, and pretty are technically descriptive verbs, and they conjugate and sit at the end of a sentence just as action verbs do. So "the bag is big" does not need a separate word for "is," because the adjective already carries it. You do not need to master that mechanism to use the words, but it explains why the tables give adjectives in the same dictionary form as verbs.

Watch the two kinds of hot and cold. Korean uses different words for hot and cold weather than for hot and cold things you touch, so the word you use for a scorching afternoon is not the word you use for a scorching cup of coffee. It feels like extra work at first and quickly becomes second nature, because the situations rarely overlap. Learn each hot and each cold as its own word, tied to weather or to touch, and you will reach for the right one without thinking.

The pairs here are worth learning two at a time: big and small, good and bad, fast and slow, easy and difficult, cheap and expensive. Opposites reinforce each other in memory, and Korean is generous with clean pairs. A card that asks you for both the word and its opposite is a small, efficient way to lock in twice the vocabulary for barely more effort.

Numbers: the two systems

Korean has two complete sets of numbers, and both are used every day, which is genuinely one of the trickier parts of early Korean. The good news is that you switch between them by context, and once you learn which set goes with which situation, it becomes a habit. Here is the short version: Sino-Korean numbers, borrowed from Chinese, handle money, dates, minutes, phone numbers, and larger counting, while native Korean numbers handle counting objects, ages, and the hour when telling time.

Sino-Korean numbers

These come from Chinese roots and follow a clean, regular pattern that makes big numbers easy to build. Use them for prices, dates, months, minutes, and phone numbers. A useful oddity: Korean counts large numbers in units of ten thousand rather than in thousands, so the word for ten thousand is a landmark you will use far more than you expect.

Native Korean numbers

These are the original Korean numbers, used for counting things, for ages, and for the hour of the clock. They are irregular in a way the Sino-Korean set is not, and they mostly matter up to about sixty in daily life, so beginners focus on one through ten plus twenty. Pair a native number with a counting word to count objects, much as English says "two cups of" rather than just "two."

How do you keep them straight? Anchor each system to a concrete habit. Money and minutes and dates pull the Sino-Korean set; your age and the number of things in front of you pull the native set. Telling time famously uses both at once, native numbers for the hour and Sino-Korean for the minutes, which sounds cruel and turns out to be the one place you drill until it sticks. Do not try to master every number before you speak. Get to ten in both systems, learn the words for hundred, thousand, and ten thousand, and add the rest as you meet them. Our fuller guide to learning Korean walks through how numbers fit into the wider plan.

Food and dining words

Food is one of the best reasons to learn Korean and one of the easiest places to start speaking, because ordering follows a simple, repeatable pattern. Learn the names of a few dishes, add 주세요 (juseyo) for "please give me," and you can eat well anywhere. Many Korean food words have also traveled into English, so words like kimchi and bulgogi are ones you may already half know.

The single most useful word at any table is 물 (mul), water, followed closely by the word for the bill when you are ready to leave. Ordering is mostly the pattern of naming a dish and saying "please," so once you can read a menu in Hangul and you know 주세요 (juseyo), a restaurant stops being intimidating. Learn the words for chopsticks and spoon too, because asking for the utensil you are missing is a common tiny victory that makes a meal go smoothly.

Travel and getting around

If you are learning Korean for a trip, these are the words that turn a stressful arrival into a manageable one. They cluster around transport, directions, and the handful of places you need to find: the station, the bathroom, the pharmacy, the bank. Korea has one of the best public transport systems anywhere, and knowing the words for subway, station, and ticket makes it genuinely easy to move around.

The words for left and right, plus the question word for where from the earlier table, are enough to ask and follow simple directions. The word for bathroom is the emergency vocabulary everyone wishes they had learned sooner, so put it near the top of your list. And the words for passport and money are the ones you will need at exactly the moment you least want to be fumbling, so drill them until they are automatic. Combine these travel words with the numbers above and you can buy a ticket, read a platform, and check a price without switching to English.

Time and days of the week

Time words let you make plans, and plans are where a lot of real conversation happens. The three you will use constantly are today, tomorrow, and yesterday, followed by the words for morning, evening, and now. The days of the week share a tidy pattern once you spot it: each ends in the same syllable romanized as -yoil, which simply means "day of the week," so you are really only learning the first part of each.

Notice how the days are built. The repeated ending means "day," and the syllable in front of it names the element or planet each day is tied to, a pattern Korean shares with several East Asian languages. You do not need the etymology to use them, but spotting the shared ending turns seven separate words into one pattern plus seven small pieces, which is far easier to memorize. Tie the time words to the number systems and you can start telling time and setting up when to meet, which is exactly the kind of practical talk that makes a language feel alive.

People and everyday nouns

Finally, the nouns for the people and places that fill ordinary sentences. These are the words you slot into the patterns you have been building: person, friend, family, the words for mother and father in both their warm and their formal forms, and the everyday places like home, school, and work. With these plus the verbs and question words, you can say who did what and where, which is most of what daily conversation needs.

A cultural note worth carrying with you: the respectful suffix romanized as -nim gets attached to roles and titles to show respect, which is why the word for teacher already carries it built in. You will also notice Korean has separate warm and formal words for mom and dad, much like the difference between "mom" and "mother" in English, and you choose based on how you are speaking and to whom. Learn the warm ones for talking about your own family and recognize the formal ones for polite settings.

With all of these themes learned, you are holding a genuinely useful core of Korean, well past the point where you can only recognize words and into the range where you can start to build sentences. The next two sections are about the part that actually matters: turning this list into words you can produce, quickly, in a real conversation.

How to memorize Korean words

A list of Korean words is worthless until it is in your head, and the way you try to memorize it decides whether that happens. The instinct is to reread the tables until they feel familiar, and that familiarity is a trap, because recognizing a word when you see it is a weak, temporary kind of memory that fades within days. The methods that actually build durable memory are active recall and spaced repetition, and they are worth understanding because they cut your total study time dramatically.

Active recall means testing yourself instead of rereading. You look at the English meaning and force yourself to produce the Korean word from memory before you check it. That small effort of retrieval, the mild struggle to dredge the word up, is the exact thing that strengthens the memory. Reading the answer teaches your brain almost nothing, while pulling it up from nothing teaches it a lot. So cover the Hangul column, look at the English, and say the Korean out loud before you peek.

Spaced repetition means reviewing each word at growing intervals over time rather than all at once. You see a new word today, again tomorrow, then a few days later, then a week later, and each successful recall pushes the next review further out. Reviewing a word right before you would have forgotten it is what makes it last, and flashcard apps built for this schedule the timing for you automatically, so you never have to track which of hundreds of words is due. If you want the full method, our guide on how to memorize vocabulary lays out exactly how to run it.

A few specific tips for Korean words in particular:

• Always say the word out loud when you recall it. Silent recall builds a memory you can read; spoken recall builds one you can speak, and it trains your mouth to make the sounds at the same time.
• Learn words inside short sentences. A word floating alone is hard to remember and harder to use. The same word doing a job in a small sentence comes with context that makes it stick and shows you how it actually behaves.
• Learn opposites and pairs together. Big and small, this and that, to know and to not know. Korean is full of clean pairs, and a pair costs barely more to remember than a single word.
• Read the Hangul, never just the romanization. Memorizing the romanization memorizes a wrong version of the sound. Anchor each word to its Hangul so the spelling and the pronunciation live in one memory.
• Pull words from your real life. A word you met in a Korean show, a song, or a conversation comes with a memory attached and sticks far better than a random word off a list.

How to start speaking these words

Here is the honest part that most vocabulary lists skip: knowing all 150 of these words does not mean you can speak Korean. There is a real gap between recognizing a word on a page and producing it out loud, at speed, in the middle of a live sentence, while someone waits for your reply. Cards and lists train the first half, the recognition. Only speaking trains the second half, the production, and only the second half is what people mean when they say they want to speak a language.

You have probably felt this gap in another context. You study a word, you would get it instantly on a flashcard, and then you are actually talking to someone, you reach for that exact word, and it is not there. The word lives in the part of your memory that answers when prompted but stays quiet when you are the one driving the sentence. Closing that gap takes a specific kind of practice: you have to retrieve these words yourself, out loud, in real time, again and again, until the path from idea to spoken word is fast and automatic.

The way to do it is to speak from the very first week, with the tiny vocabulary you have. You do not wait until you "know enough." You take the greetings, the question words, and 주세요 (juseyo), and you use them in real spoken sentences immediately, even clumsy ones. You describe your day out loud in Korean. You rehearse ordering food and then actually order it. Every time you produce a word out loud instead of just recognizing it, you drag it a little further from your reading memory into your speaking memory.

The obstacle, of course, is that speaking needs someone to speak to, and a patient partner who will let you fumble through beginner Korean at your own pace is not always sitting next to you. Plenty of learners feel too self-conscious to practice out loud with a real person while they are still stumbling, so they retreat into more lists, which is comfortable and quietly widens the very gap they are trying to close. This is exactly where an AI speaking partner earns its place. SPAIKING gives you someone to speak Korean with whenever you want, that never gets bored of your mistakes, corrects your pronunciation as you go, and lets you use these exact words in real conversation without any fear of being judged.

Think of it as the second half of the loop. This page and your flashcards are the first half, the part you can do anywhere, that puts the words in your head. Speaking is the half that is harder to arrange and easier to avoid, and it is the half that actually makes you able to talk. Learn a small batch of these words, then open SPAIKING and say them out loud in a real conversation, and you close the gap that leaves so many learners understanding a language they still cannot speak. You can see how it works on the pricing page or head back to the SPAIKING home page to start talking. Learn the words here, say them there, and Korean stops being a list and starts being something you can actually use.