Seong-Chui Shin - Mini Korean Dictionary: Korean-English English-Korean

It contains all the 12,000 essential words, idioms and expressions that are most commonly encountered in colloquial, everyday speech. For the sake of clarity, only the common Korean equivalents for each English word have been given. When an English word has more than one possible meaning, with different Korean equivalents, each meaning is listed separately, with a clear explanatory gloss. The layout is clear and accessible, with none of the abbreviations and dense nests of entries typical of many small dictionaries. Korean is spoken in both South Korea (the Republic of Korea) and North Korea (the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea), as well as in parts of China, Japan, and Central Asian nations such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (formerly republics of the Soviet Union), and has well over 70 million speakers in the Korean peninsula alone. It is not clearly related to any other languages of the world, although some linguists claim that it belongs to the Altaic family, which is made up of the Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu language groups.

It also has some striking structural similarities to Japanese, but whether Korean and Japanese are genetically related remains in dispute. The earliest form of the Korean writing system, dating from the early centuries CE, was also borrowed from Chinese, but was not widely adopted because of the structural and phonetic differences between the languages. For many centuries, Chinese was accepted as the literary language of Korea, and the native vernacular was not recorded in writing. The current form of written Korean (known as Hangul in South Korea and as Chosongul in North Korea) was invented in the 15th century at the command of King Sejong. However, for some centuries thereafter it was eschewed by the literate in favor of expression in Chinese; only toward the end of the 19th century was literacy in Korean promoted as an instrument of national pride. In Korean script each syllable is represented by a cluster of elements representing the constituent consonants and vowels, normally arranged from left to right and top to bottom within the cluster.

In South Korea there is also still some limited use of Chinese characters mixed in with Hangul, although these differ somewhat from the forms now used in China, and their pronunciation has been adapted to Korean. In this dictionary every Korean word and phrase is written in the Korean script, and also clearly transliterated into the Roman alphabet. There is no universally agreed way of writing Korean in the Roman alphabet, but this dictionary uses the new system approved and implemented by the South Korean government in 2000. The Korean-English section of the dictionary is arranged according to the alphabetical order of these romanized forms. For guidance on the pronunciation, please see the separate section following. Korean is not a tonal language, but it does have an unfamiliar set of tensed consonants, represented in this transcription by double letters.

The Korean verbs are given in the traditional dictionary form, unmarked for the differences in speech style between informal polite, formal polite and plain. The Korean language is spoken at three different levels, depending on the social status, age, and relationship between speaker and listener. The honorific or formal polite level of Korean is used when speaking to elders, to people you meet for the first time, and to those in authority or of superior status. The honorific level uses special verb endings, nouns, pronouns, and adjectives when referring to these groups of people. The standard form of Korean is the most common and is spoken to people older than you or equal in status. These would include professional coworkers.

The standard form of Korean is characterized by the ending yo tacked onto words. And the informal or humble form of Korean is used in casual speech, with those younger than you, or those older than you but in a close relationship, such as with a family member. You will also hear informal speech when a person is talking about himself/herself or to himself/herself. Informal speech doesnt use special endings on words.