🇰🇷 Lesson 14: Shopping & Money

Shopping is the perfect place to test your Korean, because every exchange is short and predictable: a greeting, a question about price or size, a decision, a payment. It's also where you'll hear the most honorific speech — shop staff speak to customers very politely — so this lesson puts Lesson 13's speech levels to work straight away, alongside the Sino-Korean numbers you need for prices.

💰 Korean Won (원)

Korean currency is the won (₩). There are no decimals — prices are whole numbers. Bills: ₩1,000 · ₩5,000 · ₩10,000 · ₩50,000. Coins: ₩10 · ₩50 · ₩100 · ₩500. Money always uses Sino-Korean numbers (Lesson 6).

(Exchange rates move; think "about ₩1,400 to the dollar" as a rough guide.)

🛍️ Shopping Vocabulary

🗣️ Shopping Phrases

Several of these contain grammar you haven't studied yet — marked below. Learn them as whole phrases now; they'll make complete sense later.

👕 Sizes & Colors

Clothing and shoe sizes are numbers: shoes in millimetres (250 = 이백오십), clothes often 90/95/100 (구십오, 백). Ask 사이즈가 뭐예요? or answer 제 사이즈는 이백오십이에요.

🧩 Grammar in Action

From Lesson 13: what staff say to you

Shop staff use the formal 합니다 style and the honorific -(으)시- toward customers. You don't need to speak like this yourself — your normal 해요 style is perfectly polite as a customer — but you need to recognise it.

🌏 Culture Note — Over-Polite Service Korean: You will often hear staff say things like 커피 나오셨습니다 ("your coffee has come out", with the honorific -시-) or 이 가방은 오만 원이세요. Strictly speaking this is incorrect — honorifics are for people, not coffee or prices — and grammar guides criticise it, but it's so common in service settings that you should expect it. Don't copy it; just understand it as "extra politeness".

From Lessons 9 and 10: particles, negation, questions

The 에 in 한 개에 천 원 is a handy extension of the time/place 에 you already know: it marks the unit a price applies to — "at one item, 1,000 won". You'll see it on every market sign.

💬 Dialogue 1: At Namdaemun Market

💬 Dialogue 2: In a Department Store

🌏 Culture Note — Where to Bargain: Bargaining (좀 깎아 주세요) is normal at traditional markets such as Namdaemun or Dongdaemun, especially when buying several items, but not in department stores, convenience stores or chain shops. Korea is extremely card-friendly — cards and phone payments work almost everywhere, even for a ₩1,000 snack — though small market stalls may prefer cash. Shops charge for plastic bags, so 봉투 필요 없어요 is a useful sentence.

If a clerk's fast honorific speech goes right past you, that's normal — even advanced learners hear it as a blur at first. Catch one word (얼마, 카드, 봉투), answer that, and you're shopping in Korean.

✏️ Practice

🧠 Check Your Understanding

❓ Common Questions

🔮 Looking Ahead

Everything so far has been in the present: "I buy", "it's expensive". Lesson 15 adds the past tense -았/었어요, so you can tell someone what you bought yesterday, how much it cost, and whether it was worth it.