KoreanClass101.com Blog

I was walking in 신촌(Shinchon) the other day and saw this big picture on the wall of a 갈비(kalbi) restaurant. I am usually trying to introduce interesting store names and signs but this week, I wanted to share this picture with you. I hope you'll enjoy this nice picture of a traditional market/festival scene of Korea (until about 100 years ago) hung on a very modern building. In the middle of this photo is the picture. In front of this building there's a 관광 버스(tour bus) waiting for its passengers. Reading from the menu that's written on the windows, this place sell 돼지 갈비, 소갈비, 냉면, and etc. :-) all of which I like very much! And if you look more closely at the picture, you can see what kind of clothes "normal" or... Show more

Our exchange student, Michael, goes home this week. We spent this weekend in Yosemite. For an 11 year-old I was surprised at how impressed he was with the sights. The typical response we have gotten from children and adults alike has been something along the lines of, "that is nice and all but we have rocks and trees in Korea too..." We asked him what he enjoyed or found different about his time in the United States and here are some of his thoughts: He was surprised that younger children needed a babysitter, that they couldn't stay at home alone for extended amounts of time. In Korea this is no big deal. He was also surprised that we don't have any 학원 here to speak of whereas in Korea everyone takes some kind of after school... Show more

I had a really long weekend recently and decided to take a short personal vacation. I headed off to 강원도 a province on the north-eastern edge of Korea. It is famous for the mountains and beaches, but I was just looking to get out of 서울. All of my long-distance travel within Korea has been by train or car, so I decided to take busses this time around. I boght a ticket for 강릉 and settled in what turned out to be a 4hr drive. It should have taken around 2~3 hours, but I guess everyone else had the same idea! I was hoping to speak as little English as possible on this trip, and since I was travelling alone, I stood a pretty good chance to getting to do just that. When I got to 강릉 the first thing I did was find a PC방. When travelling in Korea,... Show more

Here's another very interesting 간판(store signboard) I found in Seoul, Korea. If you have any interest at all about Japan, you've probably heard of Shinjuku, a major commercial center of Tokyo, Japan. And since Japan and Korea are physically so close, you can say that EVERYBODY in Korea has heard of the name "Shinjuku" or 신주쿠, as it's written in 한글(hangul). But this store cleverly used that fact in making a not-easy-to-forget store name. Before you look at the store name, please look at the pictures below. This is 쭈꾸미(jjukkumi), a kind of octopus, but a smaller kind. 쭈꾸미 is cooked many ways, but mostly with host pepper sauce (고추장) and it's made to be really spicy hot and chewy at the same time. Great taste, and allegedly very... Show more

My wife and I were recently driving through a typical suburban neighborhood when we saw a blond woman pushing a stroller down the sidewalk. My wife was captivated by her to the point that our conversation stopped. Before I could ask her what she was looking at, she said something like, "우와, 여기 미국 사람 있네." And then she laughed because she realized that obviously 미국 사람 should be here as this is 미국!  When we travelled to Korea last year we had a similar experience. We were at a museum and it was full of middle school and elementary school children visiting on a field trip. I think we were in 경주; that seems to be the place to go for extended school field trips. While my dad was enjoying saying hello to all of the students and his new found... Show more