안녕! It’s Ari, your talkative Korean friend and weekend reminder 🎉 Today’s newsletter is about an healing noodle recipe, why Korean landlords are paying tenants monthly rent?, the first Korean word you learned and more. Let’s start!
🎧 You can listen to me read on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or others.
🍜 This Chicken Ramyeon Will Heal You
As cost of eating out going up, I tend to cook at home these days. I’ll share some of the food pics that I cooked at the end. While scrolling through YouTube cooking videos for my cooking inspiration, I found this cool ramyeon recipe! Instant noodles or ramyeons are junk food. But this recipe will turn it into a decent & healthy meal. It has proteins with an egg and chicken. It also has a lot of green onion that is good for health. Watch the above video and cook for yourself. You deserve some healing food!
Pro tip. The more chopped green onions, the yummier.
🏠 Why Korean Landlords Are Paying Tenants Monthly Rent
In South Korea, you can rent a house in two ways, one is monthly rent and the other is one-time payment. The latter is an unique way of renting which I heard exists only in my country. It’s called “jesonse” or 전세. When you use jeonse, for example, you’ll pay one-time payment of 100 million KRW (72,000 USD) instead of 7 million KRW (5,000 USD) deposit and 700,000 KRW (500 USD) monthly rent. And you get back all the money when you move out. It had been very popular during the past years when interest rates were record-low. Since monthly interest was much cheaper than monthly rent, many people just borrowed money from bank to use jeonse.
However, as interest rates are quickly going up, jeonse tenants are switching to monthly payment. For landlords, it means they should give back the big chunk of money to tenants. But some landlords who leveraged the tenant’s jeonse payment to buy the house or even used the money for some reason can’t give it back to tenants. So they ask tenants to stay in return for paying the tenants’ monthly interest for them to buy more time to prepare money. As a result, this weird phenomenon of landlords paying tenants monthly rent? is happening across the country. It’s called “reversed-rent” or 역월세 in Korean. Reversed-rent is a sign that house prices are plummeting. The price of an apartment in Gangnam, Seoul, recently dropped from 2.54 billion KRW (1.8 million USD) to 1.85 billion (1.3 million USD) in just 6 month 😱
🎉 What Happened On Hangul Day
October 9th was Hangul Day on which Koreans commemorate the invention of the Korean alphabet, Hangul 🥳 On this day, many fun things happened across the country. Let me share some of the best👇
McDonald’s Korea wrote its menu strictly in Korean for the day. 사할삼푼 means 43 percent and 사할사푼 means 44 percent.
In Sejong city whose name is the same with the King who invented the alphabet, buses were wrapped with a cute King Sejong cartoon character.
Another event hold in Sejong city was Nakhwanori, traditional Korean firework. It’s a firework on the water and it’s incredibly beautiful 😍 Watch the example below. If you wanna know how it works, watch this.
Lastly, two casts of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever wrote their names in Korean commemorating Hangul Day in their promotion video. Great handwriting 👏
🥳 Learn Korean With Ari
To commemorate Hangul Day, let’s learn how to talk about the first Korean word you learned in Korean! I remember my first English word was either “Apple” or “Hello.” Btw my favorite word is “octogenarian.” I somehow really love how it sounds and I also love that there’s a word dedicated to people in a certain age bracket. Now let’s learn how to say “The first Korean word I learned is …”
👉 제가 처음 배운 한국어 단어는 ( )이에요/예요.
Fill in the black with the first Korean word you learned. If the word ends with a consonant, say 이에요. If it ends with a vowel, say 예요. Check the vocabulary in the sentence below,
제 I (polite)
처음 First
배우다 To learn (verb) In this sentence, “to learn” modifies the noun, “Korean word” so it changes its form as 배운
한국어 Korean language
단어 Word
Assignment (Level 🍰🍰)
I guess you already know today’s assignment. Fill in the blank of the above sentence to tell me the first Korean word you learned. Hope it’s not “s*bal” 🙃 Submit your assignment via voicemail or comments. Due by 4 pm Wednesday, October 19th ET. Your assignment will be shared on the next podcast episode because it deserves to be!
Lastly, here are pics of food that I cooked for myself recently.
Thanks for reading! If you liked my newsletter, like, share, or leave a tip 👇 to support my work. It’ll help me a lot to keep writing 😘 See you next week. 안녕!
안녕 and happy late 한글 day! 제가 처음 배운 한국어 단어는 사람이에요, 근데 one of my favorite word is 똑똑하다 because it sounds so fun to say! I have a lot of favorite words, but a lot of them are just based on soundㅎㅎㅎ