A good friend of mine visited Korea this past summer and suggested I write a lesson on money. Seeing as how I haven’t written anything original in literally months, I thought it was worth writing about.
If you want to learn how to count money in Korean LIKE A BOSS, read after the cut!
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I’ve already written a lesson on how to count in Korean which you can visit here. As I said in that post, there are two different counting systems in Korea: the Korean and the Sino-Korean systems. When dealing with money, you will aways use the Sino-Korean which makes it much easier to count money.
In case you didn’t already know, the currency in South Korea is the 원 (pronounced Won) which uses the symbol ₩. So if you had 500 won, it would be 오백원(oh-baek-won) using 오 meaning five, 백 meaning 100, and 원 for the currency. This is similar to counting in both Japanese and Chinese, so if you know how to count in either of those languages, just carry it over. If you don’t, it’s really simple. Counting follows the pattern of value-place-value-place, like in the above example. Another example would be say 793₩, it would be said 칠백구십삼원 (chil-baek-guu-shib-sam-won) which translates to seven hundred nine ten three won.
Counting goes slightly farther than what I mentioned in the vocabulary list linked earlier. Obviously, you usually have to deal in thousands of won, as the exchange rate is about 1000₩ to the dollar. So here’s the addendum: the words for thousand and ten thousand.
- 천 (chun) - 1,000
- 만 (man) - 10,000
That’s it; anything higher than 10,000₩, you start over from ten. An example would be 150,000₩. This would be pronounced 십오만원 (shib-oh-man-won). I don’t know what happens when you get to ten million, but I seriously doubt you’ll be dealing in numbers that big if you ever visit Korea.
There are four different bills and six different coins. The coins come in denominations of 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, and 500 pieces while the bills come in 1000, 5000, 10000, and 50000 won. Personally, I very rarely saw a Korean penny or nickel and only ever got 5000₩ bills in change. The 10000₩ is the standard denomination, much like how the $20 bill is standard in the United States. I haven’t been to Korea since the 50000₩ bill was introduced, since it only came out a couple years ago so I don’t know how common those are. Here’s an image from wikipedia I stole borrowed to show you what they look like:
The 50000₩ note, which came out in 2009, is yellow and is the first Korean bill to feature a woman.
Hopefully, this little shpeal on Korean money has been helpful. Let me know if there are other things that you would like me to talk about through either submission or ask!
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