Let's Learn Korean - Your first 58,437 words in Korean

Total words: 626

Ladies and gentlemen, brace yourself for the 58,437 most frequently used words in (south) Korean.

As promised, the list(s) of Korean vocabulary by frequency of use, as surveyed by the National Academy of the Korean Language (NAKL) and made public in 2003. Texts examined were "general reading," textbooks, newspapers, literature, magazines, movie/drama scripts, and colloquial speech from between 1990 and 1999.

You may download zip files for either Excel or text (.txt) format.

In all, the NAKL studied the most frequent vocabulary (just '단어'), proper nouns ('고유명사'), sentence connectors and sentence enders ('어미'), and particles ('조사'), and each of those categories can be looked at by frequency or by 가나다순 (let's say "alphabetical'). In the zip file containing text (.txt) version that means there are eight files, two for each category. I am unable to open Excel version, but for Excel the categories appear to be stuffed into all one file. Now about the 58,437 vocabulary. People who know me know that I am very interested in developing Korean language learning texts, and vocabulary learning material in particular. I had long hoped to be able to use this long list as a guideline for creating, say, a book of some sort, titled "Your First 100 Words in Korean," then later "Your first 200 Words in Korean," and so on. Problem is that I will have to skip a lot of words in the NAKL's list, taking, say the first 150 and weeding out 50 so as to use the 100 that remain, because is is quite obvious that some words used quite frequently according to the NAKL will nevertheless be less than appropriate for a foreign learner compared to some of the words that come much later on the list. For example, the word '너' placed 100th. '어머니' placed 106th, and '눈(eye)' came right behind her at 107. Meanwhile, '자신' is 72nd, '사회' is 42nd, and so on. '결혼' is 601st while '자금,' which you usually only start thinking about after you start thinking about 결혼, is more frequent, having placed 571st. You have to wait to get to word 972 before you run into '봄.' Obviously, a foreign learner still wrestling with his first 100, 200, 300 "vocabularies" is going to have different priorities, and if I get working on my vocabulary learning text project I will clearly have to do a lot of choosing. Also, a lot of the words will seem redundant to anyone but a pure linguist. '결혼,' for example, appears time and time again in words like '결혼하다' (1,130), '결혼식' (3,398), '결혼식장' (12,274), '연애결혼' (14,666), '결혼기념일' (22,436), '결혼시키다' (25,693), '중매결혼' (28,148), '결혼관' (30,508), '결혼설' (39,069), and once again in '중매결혼하다' (53,944).

Still, I think people will find the vocabulary list helpful. A new learner may need to know '너' sooner than he needs '자신,' but he won't be wasting his time with '자신,' either. I imagine it will be most helpful for learners who are already somewhat on their way in The Long Journey and people using the data for some other purpose. The list of most frequent particles will also be of help to many.

Even if you don't download those zip files, you'll be interested to learn that the most frequent word in Korean is "것,' while the second most frequent proper noun in the Korean language is, would you believe, '미국.'

Btw, Yonsei University was probably the first to do a similar study, beginning in the early 90's, resulting in the Yonsei Korean dictionary. Two professors at Goryeo University did their own study in 2000. Finally, the publishing house Geumseong published a Korean dictionary based (in part) on the NAKL's study this year. As dictionaries by small publishing houses go, I have always liked what Geumseong has produced.

Posted by oranckay on Monday Dec 20, 2004 in Vocabulary | |

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

The trackback URL for this entry is:

트랙백:

I opened the excel file and there are four tabs: 고유명사, 고사, 어미, & 단어. Thanks for the great resources. I’ll add them to the download sections.

I did notice that 하다01 is #2 & #7 on the 단어 list after sorting the file by 차례. I noticed the same thing for 보다01 it is #17 & #21. I’m sure that if I could understand the column headers for the other columns it would make a little more sense.

Hope everyone finds this useful.

------
호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Monday Dec 20, 2004 at 10:55 PM
The Long Journey, indeed.

Posted by ê°•ë¯¸ on Thursday Dec 23, 2004 at 05:29 AM
히히~ It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who saw that list and thought “Wow~! I don’t know crap~!!”

Posted by ã„´ã…‡ã„·ã…‡ ã… ã…‡ã� on Thursday Dec 23, 2004 at 01:55 PM
Does anyone have the content in PDF format ? As usual, I could not open both the Excel and Text files.

Posted by HuangSY on Tuesday Jan 11, 2005 at 09:01 PM
The link to the excel file and the text file for the 58437 word is lost. Could somebody send me the files.

It will be very much appreciated.

Thanks.

Posted by Eric Y. Cho on Tuesday Aug 15, 2006 at 11:27 AM
Sorry...didn’t realize that sending you here was a dead end.

I’ve found them on the NAKL site and will post them to kangmi this evening.

Posted by 강미 on Wednesday Aug 16, 2006 at 12:18 AM
waiting for the docs. Thanks.

Posted by julie on Friday Aug 25, 2006 at 01:29 AM
See here.

Posted by 강미 on Friday Aug 25, 2006 at 05:22 AM
Neither link works for me at all, & I would really love to get ahold of this list… Trying to learn korean for my boyfriend.

Posted by hannah on Saturday Aug 26, 2006 at 03:13 PM
Can you describe what you mean when you say neither link works for you? They’re zipped files, so you’ll have to unzip them before you can see the contents.

Posted by 강미 on Sunday Aug 27, 2006 at 08:48 PM
Learners may also be interested in a book I just picked up today: 6000 Essential Korean Vocabulary.

------
호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Friday Feb 16, 2007 at 03:43 PM
hi!!please send me korean words i really want to know how to speak korean

Posted by miliejun on Thursday Apr 10, 2008 at 01:07 PM
SHALOOM..

Posted by jamz on Monday Jun 9, 2008 at 01:25 PM
We do not get u vocabulary.zip files by download.
why?
if u will do it convenience for u, I am really thanks u.
S.O.S
regards,
KKThet

Posted by FKThet on Wednesday Aug 6, 2008 at 02:58 PM
Unfortunately the files were hosted on another site and that site is no longer working.

------
호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Wednesday Aug 6, 2008 at 04:10 PM
I’ve got them here and here.

Posted by 강미 on Wednesday Aug 6, 2008 at 09:10 PM
강미,
Thanks for the links, I’ve uploaded them here as well and fixed the links in the post.

------
호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Thursday Aug 7, 2008 at 10:25 AM