The Korean worth learning first, and why Hangul takes an afternoon
An alphabet built to be learnable, the two words that carry most situations, and where translation apps stop helping.
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Hangul is an alphabet, not thousands of characters
Korean is written in Hangul, an alphabet of twenty-four letters assembled into syllable blocks. It is not a character set to be memorised over years — it was deliberately designed in the fifteenth century to be learnable quickly by people with no schooling, and that design holds.
Most travellers can learn to sound out Hangul in an afternoon. Not to understand it: to read it aloud.
The payoff is larger than it sounds, because a great deal of Korean signage is loanwords written phonetically. Once the letters resolve, a menu turns into coffee, cheese, bus, taxi, ice cream. You are not translating, only reading.
The two words that do most of the work
Jeogiyo, roughly “excuse me”, is how you get attention — in a restaurant, in a shop, on the street. In Korean restaurants you call staff over rather than waiting to be noticed, and this is the word that does it. It is not rude, and waiting silently simply does not work.
Gamsahamnida is thank you, and the more freely you use it the better everything goes.
Between them these two cover an enormous share of a traveller's spoken Korean. Both are worth practising until they arrive without thinking.
The rest of a working vocabulary
Annyeonghaseyo for hello; ne for yes and aniyo for no.
Igeo juseyo — “this one, please” — which, combined with pointing, handles ordering almost anywhere.
Eolmayeyo for how much, and hwajangsil for toilet.
Mul is water, and it is free and usually self-service in restaurants rather than something you ask for.
Maepji anke haejuseyo asks for it less spicy, with no guarantee — Korean and visitor calibrations of “not spicy” are some distance apart.
Where the apps stop helping
Machine translation between Korean and English is good enough for menus, signs and simple exchanges, and camera translation over a menu is genuinely useful.
It is weaker on names and on anything regional, and it will not help at all in places with no signage in any language — which are exactly the small regional restaurants worth eating in.
Showing a written name to a taxi driver works far better than pronouncing it. That is why our place pages keep the Korean name beside the translation and the metro pages carry both: they are meant to be shown, not read out.
English is more widely spoken among younger people and in Seoul than elsewhere. Outside the cities, assume none — and assume goodwill.