A Shot of Korean
물 좀 버리고 올게요. (Mul jom bo-ri-go ol-kae-yo.) – lit. I’m going to get rid of some water and come back. fig. I’m going to the bathroom.
What an eloquent way to let people know that you’re headed to alleviate yourself? I teach this to you for two reasons. The first is that it’s one of those things that people will memorize because of its combined practicality as well as sensational nature. The second is that it’s a great phrase to memorize to learn a variety of grammatical expressions. ‘좀’ is an extremely common mitigating word, sometimes meaning ‘a little’ and other times ‘please’. ‘고’ is the most used conjunction, and means ‘and’. ‘(으)ㄹ게요’ is a common ending expressing a plan with an implicit request of permission.
Learn this single, quite memorable expression and you’ve got great examples of the usage of each of them in your memory bank. And you can make your Korean friends laugh when you head off to pee.
물 (mul) – water
좀 (jom) – please
버리다 (bo-ri-da) – to dispose of
고 (go) – and
오다 (o-da) – to come
(으)ㄹ게요 – be going to (future tense)
This Month’s Hanja
方 모 방 (bang) – method/area/direction
This one is tougher than most, as it has more than one meaning. For this month’s examples, we’re going to stick to the “method” aspect of the word.
방법 – method
방식 – way of doing things / style
처방 – recipe / prescription (처방전)
사고방식 – one’s way of thinking (idiosyncrasy)