The 100 most common Korean words

Most word lists are alphabetical, grouped by theme, or just long. This one is ordered. It is the first 100 words of our 60-level course, in the order the course teaches them, and every one is a word you can use in a sentence today.

Every entry has native audio, so you hear the word instead of guessing at the romanization, and a typing quiz at the bottom shows which ones actually stuck. No account, no email.

Five clusters account for nearly all of it, and the shape shows what Korean expects you to discuss first.

People, and who they are to you. Eighteen of the 100, more than any other group. Korean makes distinctions English does not: the word for an older sibling depends on the speaker's gender, so a man says 형 and 누나 where a woman says 오빠 and 언니. Learning fewer words does not get you out of it, because there is no neutral option.

Time. Eleven words, 오늘 (today) out to 주말 (weekend). Korean verbs carry tense lightly, so these do much of the work of placing when something happened.

Places and getting around. Another eleven, and they are the practical ones: 집, 학교, 역 (station), 지하철 (subway). Paired with 타다 and 내리다, getting on and off, that is most of a journey.

Food and drink, which in Korean is barely a separate topic from greeting someone, and the actions, which is the largest group of all and gets its own section below.

These are the first 100 words of the HanGeul course, in teaching order, from levels 1 to 3. The curriculum was built from Korean frequency data and then reordered by hand on one rule: a word earns an early place if a beginner can put it in a sentence the same day.

That rule shapes the list. 49 nouns, 40 verbs, and a small group of pointers and numbers, with no grammatical machinery you cannot yet use. It also means every word here is taught in the free part of the course, with audio, example sentences and typing practice. Nothing on this page is bait for a paywall.

The list is generated from the curriculum files rather than typed out, and a test fails the build if the two disagree. What you are reading is what the course teaches, not a snapshot someone forgot to update.

Run a frequency count over a Korean corpus and the words at the very top are mostly unusable. 것 and 수 are bound nouns: extremely common, and never standing alone, because each needs a verb phrase in front of it to mean anything. Next to them sit the particles, which have a job rather than a translation.

Learn the literal top 20 of a corpus list and you have words you cannot build a sentence with. Learn 물 instead and you can ask for water in a shop before you finish this page. Frequency is the right raw material. It is not the finished ordering.

The grammar that binds these words together is worth meeting early too, in small doses. The guide to Korean particles covers the handful that decide who is doing what to whom.

40 of these 100 are verbs, a far higher share than an English word list would carry, and not an accident. Korean puts the verb last and lets everything else fall away. Subjects and objects get dropped once context has established them, so a Korean sentence can be a single conjugated verb and still be complete.

Every verb is listed here in its dictionary form, ending in 다. That form is the one conjugation rules take as their input, so learning 먹다 rather than only 먹어요 means the polite, past and negative forms come out of a rule instead of a separate memory. The verb conjugation guide walks through that rule with the same verbs you see on this list.

하다 deserves a line of its own. It means to do, and it is also the ending that turns nouns into verbs across the whole language: 공부 (study) becomes 공부하다, 일 (work) becomes 일하다. Learning one word quietly gives you hundreds.

More than you would expect, because Korean drops anything the context already supplies. These are the course's own example sentences for words on the list, and every one is something you could say on a first trip.

The pieces holding them together are small: a polite verb ending, a particle marking who did what, and 주세요 for asking. That is most of what you need on top of the vocabulary, and both bits have their own guide, on conjugating verbs and the particles that decide who is doing what.

Korean vocabulary comes from two directions, and the first 100 contain both. Native Korean words are the oldest layer, covering what people have always talked about: 물 (water), 밥 (rice), 집 (house), 사람 (person), 아침 (morning). Sino-Korean words came from Chinese roots and carry most of the institutional and abstract vocabulary: 학교 (school), 시간 (time), 가족 (family), 지하철 (subway).

Notice this early, because the Sino-Korean layer is systematic. Its roots recombine, so a syllable you learn in one word keeps turning up in others and your guess about a new word is often right. The guide to learning Korean vocabulary shows how those root families work.

The split also explains the strangest thing on this list: two sets of numbers. 하나, 둘, 셋 are the native ones, and there is a Sino-Korean set alongside them, each used in different situations. The Korean numbers guide covers which one each occasion calls for.

A list of glosses hides the interesting part. These eight surprise people, either because Korean splits a meaning English keeps together, or because the spelling does something the pronunciation never warns you about.

Reading a list is not the same as knowing it. Type the Korean, and if you get one wrong the feedback shows you which letter, not just that you missed. You do not need a Korean keyboard: the on-screen keys sit exactly where a Korean layout puts them.

Do not take the list in one sitting. Ten words a day, met again tomorrow and then a few days later, beats an afternoon of staring at all 100. A word you recall after nearly forgetting it sticks far better than one you have just reread.

Type each word rather than recognising it. Korean spelling keeps letters the pronunciation smooths away, so a word you can pick out of a list is not yet a word you can write. That gap stays invisible until something asks you to produce it.

Say them out loud. Every entry has native audio for that reason: romanization is an approximation, and the tense and aspirated consonants that separate Korean words have to be heard before you can make them. If the letters are still new, the free Korean alphabet guide takes 90 minutes and makes this whole list readable.