In the previous lesson, we learned about counters and what kinds of nouns each one is associated with. In this lesson, we’ll learn about some counters that change their meaning based on the context you use them in.
Let’s take a look at the counter 층, which is used to count floors:
I’m on the fifth floor.
You have to go up five more floors.
The second sentence above is…a bit advanced for where we are right now. If it caught you off guard, let me break down the latter half for you. Firstly, we should recognize 더, meaning more, from an earlier lesson on adverbs.
”~야 돼요” is the conjugated form of the grammer ending “~야 되다”, a grammar ending that means I have to/I need to. “올라가셔” is the conjugated form of the verb 올라가시다, which is the honorific version of the verb 올라가다, meaning to rise/ascend. If you’re blanking on this, see the earlier lesson on honorific verb endings.
Combine it all together with 다섯 층 and you get the above sentence.
As you can see from the above sentence examples, when the counter 층 is used with Sino-Korean numbers, it denotes the number of the floor you’re talking about. When it’s used with native Korean numbers, it denotes the number of floors.
There are other counters that change their meaning based on which number system you use them with. Some more examples:
chapter 1, chapter 2…/one chapter, two chapters…
number one, number two…/one time, two times…
building one, building two…/one building, two buildings…
번, when used with Sino-Korean numbers, is used to represent which number a noun is labeled. 동 is just a more specific version of this. For example:
Student 456
Table 3
Remember that Korean is very context reliant! Sometimes you do not need to specify a noun after the counter. For example, “456번” is fine on its own if it’s clear you are already talking about students. In Netflix’s hit show Squid Game, Lee Jungjae’s character is often referred to as simply “456번”, translated to English as “Player 456” even though the word for “player” was not said in Korean.
Remember that you can default to 개 if you’re ever unsure of what counter to use! There are many counters, and some are not very common. Don’t be afraid of 개.
I also mentioned in the last lesson’s wrap up that there are sometimes two counters that mean the same thing, even though they may be used with different number systems. For example, there are two counters that you can use to count months - 개월 and 달. 월 comes from Chinese, with 月 (yuè) being the corresponding hanja. So, 개월 uses Sino-Korean numbers, while 달 uses native Korean. However, they are interchangeable.
3 months
3 months
Koreans will switch to Sino-Korean numbers and 개월 when talking about durations longer than ~6 months, just like they switch to Sino-Korean in other situations when the count gets relatively high.
This wraps up our intro to counting! You should now be able to count up to the billions in Korean, and use counters to count objects and other nouns. Want to test your knowledge? Check out the matching tiles vocabulary exercises:
In the next lesson, we learn how to use our new skills to tell the time. See you in the next one.