Now, it's time to begin some grammar-related things. I think the most easiest part to learn in languages is nouns, so this post is about Korean nouns.

Basic Vocabulary

To make it more interesting, you need to know some basic vocabularies.

I will show family names in the following lecture.

Same Pronunciation with Different Meanings

Because Korean has much more simplified pronunciations than Chinese has, there are many words that have different meanings but same pronunciations. In fact, sometimes there are differences on the length of vowels which are usually ignored by Koreans. Koreans determine the meanings depending on the context.

Nouns from Foreign(Latin) Languages

We approximate² the pronunciations of words from English, French, and other languages. Sometimes those approximation are different between North Korea and South Korea because dialects of North Korea have stronger consonants and heavily affected by Russia. Here, I will use only South Korean.

Some words are transformed under influence by Japanese, or just "Konglish" (Korean English).

And of course, the names of many countries and regions in the world are in this category.

and many others.

But the names of some countries which were introduced by Japan or in earlier periods are used in Hanja representations.

The name of our country, "Korea", is made from the name a kingdom which existed at the medieval age in the Korean peninsula, "고려(高麗)". This kingdom had very activated trades of many products with other countries including China and Arabs.

Subjective & Objective Form and Pronouns

Basically, we don't distinguish subjective and objective forms because we have postpositions that indicates the role of the words which it decorates. I will introduce postpositions later.

To make them adjectives, like 'my', 'your', 'his', and etc, you can just append a postposition '~의'. Exceptionally 'my' and 'your' can be also used as '내/제' and '네' respectively. To represent someone's belongings, just append another word '것' which means (some)thing, like 'mine' = '나의 것/내 것/제 것', 'yours' = '너의 것/네 것', and 'his' = '그의', '그의 것'.

Single and Plural

To make nouns plural, you may just append a suffix '들' like '-s' or '-es' in English. There is no variation of original nouns. But Korean language does not strictly distinguish single and plural nouns, so this can be omitted in many cases. Usually if a noun is decorated by adjectives or used as a subject, then the plural form is more frequently used.

Articles

Korean does not have articles such as 'a', 'an', and 'the' in English. You can just put nouns in proper positions without any articles and any pluralization. If you want to emphasize that a noun is single, you may use '한'(the attributive form of ordinal number/native cardinal one) in front of it, but this is not necessary and actually unnatural in many contexts.

There is no strict separation between uncountable and countable nouns. They are countable or uncountable only conceptually, with no grammatical differences due to absence of articles. Of course, we don't pluralize uncountable nouns such as '사랑' which means 'love'.

In fact, putting proper articles for various abstract nouns is the most difficult part for Koreans when they learn English. (Maybe this post has also many mistakes about this.)

Basically Korean uses the same system of Western society (Gregorian calendar) to represent dates and times. The standard time zone of South Korea is GMT+09:00 without the summer time period. It's same to Tokyo, Japan.

For traditional holidays, we count them on a lunar calendar which is based on Chinese calendar. We don't have any traditional holidays based on weekdays like United States (eg. Thanksgiving day is the fourth Thursday of November in U.S.) because we didn't have the weekday concept before Western culture was introduced.

We had a very different calendar system at the past, which divided a year into 24 periods and count the year based on the starting years of kings' ruling period¹ or 60 years of "Kanji" cycles. Before using the concept of weeks, China and Korea usually divided a month into 5 or 10 days. I will introduce this traditional calendar system on another post later.

Weekdays

You may notice the name of monday and sunday have the same meaning to English ones. Also other names have some relations to English names.³ For example, saturday is come from 'Saturn' which also means the sixth planet of our solar system and we say that planet as '토성(土星)'. These weekdays names are influenced by Japan that uses same names.⁴

5-days work on a week is now widely accepted in South Korea, so the friday is beginning of weekends like most Western countries, but without shortened work time at that day. (In Sweden, the work time on fridays is often shorter than other weekdays, but in Korea, there is almost no exceptions.)

Saying Years, Months and Days

We write dates in 'Year Month Day' order while Americans use 'Month Day Year' and Sweden uses 'Day Month Year'. Almost everybody knows English month names though they are not used frequently in Korea, and there are no month names in (modern) Korean.⁵

So we just say January as '1월', February as '2월', ..., December as '12월'. The character '월' is Korean pronunciation of Chinese character '月' which means month or the moon. All numbers in dates are said in the cardinal number form.

Generally, year is '년(年)', month is '월(月)', and day is '일(日)' or '날'⁶.
Example: April 12, 2008 = 2008년 4월 12일 (이천팔년 사월 십이일)

Usually 3000BC is said '기원전(紀元前) 3000년' and AD2000 (or CE2000) is said '기원후(紀元後) 2000년' in some historical contexts. '기원' means a specific moment of a historic event depending on the context--here, the birth of Jesus Christ.

Saying Time

To say hours in Korean, you should use ordinal numbers, but cardinal numbers for minutes and seconds.

I think it would be faster to look some examples.

We don't have some varied expressions to say times such as 'ten past twelve', 'a quarter past three', etc in English, but just say the exact numbers.

General Nouns about Times

Time Span

We use '시간(時間)' instead of '시(時)' and other parts are same.⁷

Using numbers in Korean is very similar to Japanese and Chinese because those three use same Chinese numbers with different pronunciations. But this fact is applied for only cardinal numbers(one, two, three, ...), not ordinal numbers (eg. first, second, third, ...).

Basic Reading

Actually, these ordinal numbers are not actually ordinal. They are original-Korean numbers, and used to make real ordinal numbers in some contexts. (So if you use this forms as it is, it's not an ordinal number. To know how to use them, see the end of this post.)

English-like languages have special notations for 11 and 12, but Korean-like languages doesn't have such exceptions.

English puts a comma between every 3-digits because it uses 'thousands' scaling, but Korean puts it between every 4-digits because it uses 'ten-thousands(만)' scaling. However, 3-digits separation is more frequently used in the real life such as banks.

Some examples:

If you use 1 in places of larger than 10000, we usually add a prefix '일'(1) to the number. So 1000,0001 is 일억일, not 억일, but 1,0000 is 만, not 일만. (You may use '일만', but it's only in some formal notations.)
It's easy to think the last example as 1x10⁸ (일x억) + 2345x10⁴ (이천삼백사십오x만) + 6789x1 (육천칠백팔십구). If you want test yourself, there is a perl script that converts arabic numbers to Korean pronunciations. (Note that the script uses CP949 or EUC-KR encoding, not UTF-8. But I think if you copy & paste its source code in UTF-8 encoding, then it will run well in UTF-8 encoding.)

Floating numbers

To speak floating numbers, you can say '.' as 점, and the following digits in 1-digit numbers, such as:
10.13579 = 십점일삼오칠구
365.2422 = 삼백육십오점이사이이

For more mathematical notations such as equations, fractions and squares, I will introduce them (maybe far-_-) later.

Using ordinal numbers

If you use ordinal numbers as the attributive forms, the last sounds in 2, 3, 4 and 20 are dropped. The affix '-째' is something similar to '-th' in English.

and so on.

You can read an article about Korean numerals on Wikipedia instead of this.