Sofie to Korea

When I’m not living out my inner (Korean speaking) polyglot on this blog, I’m actually working as an economist specializing in policy evaluation. Over the past few weeks I’ve learned lots of valuable vocabulary from my TTMIK News subscription that has made it so much easier to explain in Korean what I do for a living. A few examples of my recently acquired specialized vocab:

Propensity to consume: 소비성향

Unemployment rate: 실업률 (Note: anything with 률/율 means rate)

Analysis: 분석

Research result: 연구 결과

Evaluation:  평가

Reveal: 밝히다

Effect: 효과

Increase: 증가(하다)

Decrease: 감소(하다)

Average: 평균

So far so good, but those Korean numbers (the large ones especially to say nothing about the decimals and fractions) still caused me some problems. When reading a news article out loud, there is nothing that is sure to stop my relatively flowing pace like numbers. Arghhh…. As always, I turn to www.talktomeinkorean.com in times of (Korean) crisis. For $4.99 I downloaded the e-book “Korean numbers” from their webshop www.mykoreanstore.com. Together with audio files this resource contains a pdf document with anything you need to know about Korean numbers:

• How to use counter words properly
• How to say the first, second, twentyseventh…. etc.
• How to read out powers like 2^2 (2 squared)
• How to read decimals and fractions
• How to pronounce years
• How to say 100,000,000 in Korean (spoiler alert: this number is pronounced 억 in Korean)
• …And when to use the Sino- and native-Korean number systems

The e-book is a great easy-to-grasp resource which quickly demystifies the dark arts of math in Korean ^^ Now I can’t wait to go to my world economic conference in June and hopefully single out some Korean economists to talk to about numbers and research!

Just for fun, I also grabbed TTMIK’s e-book Drama phrases, vol. 1 at the checkout. I simply couldn’t resist, and studying is supposed to be fun, right?