The grammar keeps track of who you are talking to

Once hangul is in hand, pronunciation stops being the problem quickly. What takes longer is that Korean grammar keeps asking questions English never does: how old is this person, how well do I know them, and what kind of thing am I counting. None of it will stop a traveller getting fed or getting home, but it explains a great deal of what you hear.

Every sentence ends on a speech level. The same verb, to eat, comes out as 먹습니다 (muhk-SSEUM-nee-dah) in an announcement or a news bulletin, 먹어요 (MUH-guh-yo) in ordinary polite talk and 먹어 (MUH-guh) between friends. A further marker, -시- (shee), raises the person being talked about rather than the one being talked to, which is why staff send you off with 안녕히 가세요 and not a plainer form. Stay on -요 and you will always be right; the shifts you hear around you are other people's relationships, not mistakes.

There are two sets of numbers, and you need both by the first evening. Prices, minutes, floors, bus routes and phone numbers use the Sino-Korean set, il, ee, sahm. Hours, ages and anything counted out use the native set, hah-NAH, dool, set, which shortens in front of a counting word. Half past three is therefore 세 시 삼십 분 (seh shee sahm-SHIP boon): native three for the hour, Sino thirty for the minutes.

Nothing is counted without its counting word. Korean does not say two beers; it says beer, two, bottles — 맥주 두 병 (MEHK-joo doo BYUHNG). Glasses are 잔 (jahn), people 명 (myuhng), animals 마리 (MAH-ree), tickets and other flat things 장 (jahng), and the all-purpose 개 (geh) covers most other objects. Using 개 for everything sounds clumsy but is always understood.

The verb comes last, so the point arrives at the end. Korean runs subject, object, verb, with particles fixed to each noun, and drops the subject whenever context supplies it. A sentence can hang open until its final syllable, where the negative, the question and the politeness all land. Listen to the end before you nod. When you speak, naming the thing and adding -이요 is often a whole sentence: 서울역이요 (suh-ool-LYUH-gee-yo), Seoul Station, please, is a complete request in a taxi.

An alphabet built to be learned

Korean has a reputation for difficulty that its writing does not deserve. Hangul was designed in the 1440s at the court of King Sejong so that people who could not read Chinese characters could write their own language, and it still does that job: fourteen basic consonants and ten vowels, stacked into square syllable blocks and spelled very nearly as they are said. Give it an afternoon before you fly and the station names, shop fronts and menus stop being pattern and start being words — often English in disguise, like 아이스 아메리카노 (ah-ee-seu ah-meh-ree-KAH-no), the iced americano the whole country seems to run on.

The real work is in the consonants. Most come in sets of three — plain, breathy and tense — where English makes do with two: ㄷ, ㅌ and ㄸ are a soft d-or-t, a t with a puff of air, and a tight t with no air at all, and swapping one for another changes the word. The tense ones, written double, are the knack to practise: tighten the throat and let no breath out, as in 빨리 (PPAHL-lee), quickly. Then come the joins. A consonant at the end of a block is clipped, so 옷 (ot), clothes, and 꽃 (kkot), flower, end on the same unreleased t, and it can reshape the block after it: 신라, the ancient kingdom, is said SHEEL-lah. Learn the letters, then read everything aloud, block by block. Even 서울 turns out to be two syllables, suh-OOL, not one.

Six things that catch visitors out

Never write a living person's name in red. Red ink was traditionally used to record the names of the dead, and writing a friend's name in it still unsettles many Koreans. Borrow a black or blue pen for the guestbook, the birthday card or the name scrawled on a coffee cup.

The fourth floor is often called F. Four, 사 (sah), sounds like the Sino-Korean word for death, so lifts in many buildings label that floor F, and some hospitals leave it out altogether. Plenty of people shrug at it, but a gift of four of anything is still a small misjudgement.

A jjimjilbang has a bath half and a clothed half. The 찜질방 (JJEEM-jeel-bahng), a bathhouse with heated rooms that usually stays open all night, is one of the country's best-value evenings and a normal place to sleep. In the single-sex baths everyone is naked and showers thoroughly before getting into any pool. In the shared halls and saunas everyone wears the T-shirt and shorts handed over at the desk. Fold a towel into the lamb's-head hat called 양머리 (YAHNG-muh-ree) if you want to look like a regular.

The pink seat on the subway is not for you. Seoul's trains keep the seats at the ends of each carriage for elderly, disabled and pregnant passengers, and many lines add pink seats in the middle marked for pregnant women. Even on a packed train, Koreans of all ages tend to leave them empty rather than sit and risk being asked to move.

You carry your own rubbish. Public bins are scarce in Korean cities, and household waste is sorted strictly: general rubbish in designated paid bags, recycling by type, and food waste on its own. In a guesthouse, find the labelled bins and use them; on the street, keep the wrapper until you pass a convenience store, which usually has a bin by the door.

A night out comes in numbered rounds. Dinner with colleagues or new friends is 1차 (EEL-chah), the first round, and it is rarely the last: the group moves on to 2차 (EE-chah), a bar or a 노래방 (no-REH-bahng), a private karaoke room, and sometimes to a third. Whoever is senior or did the inviting usually pays for the first round, and it is gracious to offer to cover a later one. Leaving after the first is fine, as long as you thank whoever paid before you go.

A country that reads English better than it speaks it

South Korea is one of the easiest places in Asia to get around without the language, and one of the harder ones in which to hold a conversation without it. Seoul's subway names every station in hangul and in roman letters and announces stops in Korean and English, the KTX trains do the same, and most young Koreans have had years of English at school. What those lessons built is reading and grammar far more than speech, so plenty of people who understand a written question perfectly will freeze when it is asked aloud. Typing it on your phone and holding out the screen often works where repeating it louder never will.

Outside the tourist core of the big cities the English thins quickly. Taxi drivers, market traders, the cook at a 기사식당 (kee-sah-SHEEK-ttahng), the cheap drivers' canteens by the main roads, and most people over fifty will meet you in Korean or through a translation app. Carry destinations written in hangul rather than romanised, because the same palace or district can be spelled two or three ways on neighbouring signs. Google Maps gives only patchy directions in Korea; locals use Naver Map or KakaoMap, both of which have English modes.

None of this means Korean is wasted on a short trip. A handful of phrases — 안녕하세요 (ahn-nyohng-hah-SEH-yo), 감사합니다 (kahm-sah-HAHM-nee-dah), 이거 주세요 (EE-guh JOO-seh-yo) — open almost every exchange you will have, and people notice when a visitor has bothered. The usual response is visible pleasure and a compliment on your Korean far larger than it has earned; accept it and carry on.

Every conversation starts by working out the order

Korean sorts people before it talks to them. The polite speech the kit teaches, 존댓말 (jon-DEHN-mahl), is what strangers, shop staff and colleagues use with one another, and it is all a visitor will ever need. 반말 (BAHN-mahl), the casual speech that drops the endings, belongs to close friends of the same age, younger family and children. Moving into it is a step in a friendship, usually offered by the older person; using it uninvited with an adult stranger is one of the few slips that lands badly even from a foreigner.

Age is reckoned more than one way. Korea switched its legal and official age to the international count in 2023, but the older habit of counting everyone as one at birth and a year older every New Year still colours how people talk, so the cleanest way to settle seniority is by birth year. Once it is known it decides who speaks first, who pours and what two people call each other.

Names come with titles, and family words fill the gaps. The honorific -님 (neem) goes on roles rather than names: 선생님 (suhn-SEHNG-neem) for a teacher or a doctor, 사장님 (sah-JAHNG-neem), boss, for the owner of almost any small shop. Among adults of similar standing it is the name plus 씨 (sshee), never used about yourself. Friends borrow kinship words: a woman calls an older man 오빠 (OH-ppah) and an older woman 언니 (UHN-nee), while a man says 형 (hyuhng) and 누나 (NOO-nah). In homely restaurants regulars call a middle-aged server 이모 (EE-mo), auntie.

Thanks and refusals are short, and two hands do the rest. 감사합니다 is the safe thanks; 고맙습니다 (koh-MAHP-sseum-nee-dah) is just as polite and a shade warmer. To turn down a second helping, a sample or an offer of help, 괜찮아요 (gwehn-CHAH-nah-yo) with a small sideways wave of the hand is enough. Give and receive money, cards and gifts with both hands when the other person is older, and when an elder is drinking with you, turn your head slightly away as you lift your own glass.

Seoul sets the standard, and the provinces answer back

The Korean in this kit, and on every broadcast, is 표준어 (PYO-joon-uh), the standard language based on the speech of Seoul. Everyone understands it. But regional dialects are strong and proudly kept, and the moment you leave the capital region you will hear them in markets, in taxis and on station platforms.

The loudest belongs to Gyeongsang, the southeast, which takes in Busan and Daegu. It keeps a pitch accent the standard has lost, so it rises and falls where Seoul speech stays level, and it is cheerfully reputed to sound blunt. The Busan line every Korean can imitate is 뭐라카노 (MWOH-rah-kah-no), what are you on about? Busan is a port that eats like one: raw fish straight from the Jagalchi market on the harbour, 돼지국밥 (DWEH-jee-gook-bahp), pork and rice soup, and 밀면 (MEEL-myuhn), cold wheat noodles said to have been created by refugees who arrived during the Korean War.

In the southwest, the Jeolla provinces are known as the country's best kitchen, and Jeonju and Gwangju lay the table to prove it, with meals arriving under a crowd of side dishes. 비빔밥 (bee-beem-BAHP) is Jeonju's own dish, best eaten near its hanok village of tiled-roof houses. Jeolla speech has its own soft sentence endings and a famously elastic word, 거시기 (GUH-shee-gee), which can stand in for almost any noun the speaker cannot be bothered to find.

Jeju, the volcanic island off the south coast, is the most different of all. Its traditional speech, Jejueo, is so far from standard Korean that mainlanders cannot follow it, and UNESCO lists it as critically endangered. You will see it in the welcome at the airport, 혼저옵서예 (hon-juh op-suh-YEH), and hear it among older islanders, including the haenyeo, the women who free-dive for shellfish and whose tradition is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. Hallasan, the highest mountain in South Korea, rises in the middle, and grilled black pork is the island's meal.

South Korea, in sixty small pieces

Everything the card at the top of Start draws from — one a day, and here is the whole file. Read it on the plane.

• Sungkyunkwan was founded in 1398 as the royal Confucian academy, and its name still belongs to a working university in Seoul.
• The magpie counts as a bringer of good news, and one calling near the house is taken to mean a visitor is on the way.
• Joseon court historians kept a daily record of the king that the king himself was not permitted to read; one who fell from his horse asked for the fall to be left out, and the historian wrote down the request as well.
• New Year is marked with tteokguk, a soup of sliced rice cake in clear broth, and the saying goes that you are not a year older until you have eaten your bowl.
• Soju is poured for other people and never for yourself, with the bottle held in two hands when the person opposite you is older.
• Early summer brings jangma (장마), a stalled rain front that parks over the peninsula for weeks and delivers much of the year's water at once.
• Cheomseongdae in Gyeongju is a bottle-shaped stone tower from the seventh century, built for watching the sky and standing intact ever since.
• A standardised rain gauge called the cheugugi was issued to officials across the country in 1441 so rainfall could be measured the same way everywhere.
• The Jikji, printed in 1377 at a temple in Cheongju, is the oldest surviving book made with movable metal type, decades ahead of Gutenberg's press.
• Dalgona is street toffee made from nothing but melted sugar and a pinch of baking soda, pressed flat and stamped with a shape to be cut out.
• Singing happens in a noraebang (노래방), a private room rented by the hour with a tambourine on the table and a score at the end of every song.
• Bibimbap (비빔밥) means simply mixed rice, and when it comes in a heated stone bowl the grains against the sides toast into a crisp golden crust.
• More than eighty thousand woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana, carved in the thirteenth century, still stand at Haeinsa in halls whose latticed walls keep them dry.
• Sunday means hiking for a great many people, who ride the metro to the edge of the city in full mountain gear and come down for tofu stew and rice wine.
• Roughly seventy per cent of the land is mountain, which is why farms, villages and cities are squeezed into the flat gaps between ridges.
• Gochujang, the thick red chilli paste, is fermented from glutinous rice and soybean, traditionally in earthenware onggi jars kept out on a sunny terrace.
• Ssireum is belt wrestling in a ring of sand: each fighter grips the other's satba sash, and the bout ends the moment a knee touches the ground.
• Kimjang (김장) is the late-autumn stretch when families gather to make a winter's worth of kimchi in one go, a tradition UNESCO lists as living heritage.
• Goryeo potters invented sanggam, a way of carving a pattern into celadon and filling the lines with white and black clay before the jade-green glaze goes on.
• Hwaiting (화이팅) borrows the English word fighting and turns it into encouragement — go on, you can do it — shouted at exams and marathons alike.
• At a baby's first birthday the child is set before a table of objects and left to grab one, each standing for a different future; the ritual is doljabi.
• Seoul (서울) simply means capital, and unlike other Korean cities it has no Chinese-character spelling to fall back on.
• Homes are heated by ondol (온돌), pipes under the floor rather than radiators on the wall, which is why life happens at floor level and shoes come off at the door.
• Baseball crowds sing for the whole game: every player has a personal chant, and cheerleaders on a stage lead the stands through it inning after inning.
• The west coast tide falls by several metres, and the mudflats it uncovers twice a day are a World Heritage site alive with crabs and wading birds.
• Nunchi (눈치) translates as eye measure and means the knack of reading a room — sensing the mood and hearing what is not being said.
• At Chuseok, the autumn harvest holiday, families steam songpyeon — half-moon rice cakes filled with sesame or bean — on a bed of pine needles.
• The fortress walls of Hwaseong at Suwon went up in the 1790s with the help of a pulley crane designed for the job by the scholar Jeong Yak-yong.
• Hanji is paper made from mulberry bark, layered against the grain, and sheets of it have survived centuries in books, doors and even clothing.
• The greeting annyeonghaseyo (안녕하세요) is a question about peace — roughly, are you at ease? — rather than a wish for a good day.
• Pansori is an epic sung by one voice with a single barrel drum for company, and a full telling runs for hours with the audience shouting encouragement.
• The Jindo dog, a white curled-tail hunting breed from the island of that name, is protected as a national natural monument.
• Couples wear deliberately matching outfits down to the shoes, and shops sell the two halves together as a set.
• Grass-covered royal tombs the size of small hills sit in the middle of Gyeongju, so the city is laid out around mounds fifteen centuries old.
• The haenyeo of Jeju free-dive for shellfish without air tanks, working into old age and surfacing with a whistling breath called sumbisori.
• A jjimjilbang is a bathhouse with heated rooms open all night, where families nap on the warm floor in matching cotton shirts and eat eggs baked in the sauna.
• People say uri (우리), our, where English would say my: our country, our house, our school, and very often our husband or wife.
• Ginkgo trees line the streets of most cities and turn a uniform butter yellow in late autumn, dropping fruit that smells far worse than it looks.
• Two complete sets of numbers are in daily use: you give the hour in native Korean and the minutes in the Sino-Korean set, in a single breath.
• The name Korea comes from Goryeo, a dynasty whose traders met visitors who carried the sound home and never quite gave it back.
• Jeju is riddled with lava tubes, tunnels left behind where molten rock drained away under a cooling crust; Manjanggul is one you can walk into, ribbed along the walls with the lines the retreating lava left.
• Jeong (정) is the slow attachment that builds between people, or towards a place, and Koreans will tell you outright that English has no word for it.
• Taekwondo was codified in the twentieth century from older Korean kicking arts and has been a full Olympic medal sport since the Sydney Games.
• Naengmyeon are chewy buckwheat noodles served in an icy broth, and they arrive with a pair of scissors so you can cut them short enough to eat.
• Chimaek (치맥) welds chicken to maekju, the word for beer, and names the pairing of fried chicken and a cold glass that fills the country's evenings.
• Inside the Seokguram grotto above Gyeongju sits a granite Buddha carved in the eighth century, placed to face the sunrise over the East Sea.
• Writing a living person's name in red ink is avoided, because red was once reserved for recording the names of the dead.
• Makgeolli is an unfiltered rice wine, milky and lightly fizzy, that settles in the bottle and has to be tipped gently before it is poured.
• Once you know a few endings, the map explains itself: -san is mountain, -gang is river and -sa is temple, so Hallasan, Hangang and Bulguksa each announce what they are before you arrive.
• A meal arrives surrounded by banchan (반찬), small side dishes that come with the food and are refilled as often as you empty them, at no extra charge.
• Ginseng has been farmed here for centuries under slatted shade screens, and the root is left in the ground for six years before it is lifted.
• On the hottest days of summer the remedy is samgyetang, a whole young chicken simmered with ginseng, garlic and sticky rice — heat fought with heat.
• Hangul (한글) was designed rather than inherited: its consonant letters picture the shape the mouth, tongue and throat make as you say them.
• Bap meogeosseoyo? (밥 먹었어요?) means have you eaten rice, and it is asked the way English speakers ask how are you.
• More than three thousand islands lie off the southern and western coasts, most of them uninhabited, in waters known as the sea of many islands.
• The table set is a sujeo (수저) — a long metal spoon for rice and soup, and flat metal chopsticks for everything else — and the bowl stays on the table rather than being lifted to the mouth.
• Bukhansan, a national park of granite peaks and temple trails, lies partly inside Seoul's city limits and is reached by underground train.
• The water on a restaurant table is usually boricha, roasted barley tea, poured free and drunk cold in summer and hot in winter.
• Twice a year the tide at Jindo drops far enough to uncover a road of seabed nearly three kilometres long, and crowds walk it to the island opposite.
• Busan (부산) means cauldron mountain, named for the shape of the peak standing over the harbour.