Counting Won (일, 이, 삼)

Korean didn’t settle on one way to count. There’s a native Korean set for things like age and counting objects one by one, and a separate Sino-Korean set, borrowed from Chinese centuries ago, for anything with a fixed, official feel: money, addresses, phone numbers, dates. This lesson is entirely the second kind. The good news is that it’s the more regular of the two, built from ten digits and a small set of place values that combine like Lego.

The Ten Digits

Once you have 일 through 구 and 십, every number up to 99 is just multiplication and addition read left to right. 이십 (2 x 10) is twenty, 이십삼 (2 x 10 + 3) is twenty-three. No “twenty-one, twenty-two” style irregularity to learn.

One trap: 만 marks ten thousand, not a thousand. Korean prices jump from 천 (thousand) straight to 만 (ten thousand) with nothing in between, which is why Korean money always sounds enormous in direct translation. 오만 원 isn’t “five money,” it’s 50,000 won.

How Much Is It?

Floors and Room Numbers

The same digits, attached to a different counter word, cover floors (층), room numbers (호), and bus or gate numbers (번).

What Month Is It?

Months are just number + 월, with two exceptions that break the pattern purely for ease of pronunciation: June is 유월, not 육월, and October is 시월, not 십월.

Months

Money & Shopping