Indicating Locations and Directions in Korean

Introduction

First of all, congratulations if you have completed all the basic level lessons!

You've grasped the essential fundamentals and are now prepared to advance to the beginner level, which will contain all you need to make your first sentences and engage in basic interactions with Koreans.

While you’re staying in Korea, even though you’ll have your KakaoMap or NaverMap installed, you’ll probably struggle at some point to find a detailed direction. Let’s see how to say and understand directions in Korean.

Here’s how you can recognize it: the infinitive form of Korean verbs always ends with 다. This is a clear indicator that the verb is in its base or dictionary form.

For that we’ll also provide you a list of words to tackle many different situations.

N에 - At/In/To

As you learned in the lesson 7, the way to ask where is a place or object is the following:

… 어디에 있어요? (Where is …?)

가방이 어디에 있어요?
Where is the bag?

Remember that Korean language relies a lot on context.

Without specifying any noun, “어디에 있어요?” is just like “where is [the thing we just talked about]?” or “where are you?”, “where is he/she?”

Now that we refreshed our memory, let’s get more into details on the grammatical structure of this sentence.

In Korean, the particle "에" plays a crucial role in indicating direction, location, or time (which you will learn in a next lesson), depending on the context in which it's used. It is attached to nouns to specify when or where something happens, akin to prepositions in English like "to," "at," "in," or "on." Let's break down its uses.

Indicating Location

"에" can also indicate the location where an action takes place, similar to the English prepositions "at" or "in". Simple examples:

학교에 있어요 - to be at school

가방에 있어요 / 가방 안에 있어요 - to be in the bag

In an upcoming lesson, we'll explore the function of the 이/가 particles. For the time being, simply think of them as indicators of the subject in a sentence.

Now, let’s see some available prepositions to describe locations:

안
Inside
아래
Below / Under
밑
Bottom
위
Above / On top
앞
Front
뒤
Back / Behind
옆
Beside / Next to
밖
Outside
건너편
Opposite / Across

And some more concrete examples on how it is used:

내 핸드폰이 어디에 있어요?
Where is my phone?
가방에 있어요 / 가방 안에 있어요
It’s inside the bag

내 가방이 어디에 있어요?
Where is my bag?
네 가방이 책상 아래에/밑에 있어요
Your bag is below the desk

책이 어디에 있어요?
Where is the book?
책상 위에 있어요
It’s on the desk

자전거가 집 앞에 있어요
The bicycle is in front of the home
공원이 학교 뒤에 있어요
The park is behind the school
약국이 은행 옆에 이있어요
The pharmacy is next to the bank (은행)
식당이 건물 밖에 있어요
The restaurant is outside the building (건물)
백화점이 시장 건너편에 있어요
The department store is across the street from the market (시장)

Indicating Location

Now that we’ve seen many ways to indicate locations, let’s dive into a more simple yet important concept: directions.

First, differentiating/to distinguish left and right :

왼쪽
Left
오른쪽
Right

In order to avoid any future confusion about which word indicates which direction, you can use the following mnemonic technique:

Consider that in the world there is more right handed people than left handed. Therefore remember that the term with more syllables signifies "right"(오른쪽) and the one with fewer syllables signifies "left" (왼쪽).

Also, here’s how to say left/right handed:

왼손잡이
Left handed
오른손잡이
Right handed

쪽 is a word often attached to a word to indicate a direction. You can also attach it to the following cardinal directions:

If you ever visited Seoul, you will realize that you encountered some of these words more often than you would have guessed. Here are some examples for your culture knowledge:

강남: a famous district in Seoul, it stands for “south of the 강 (river)”, referring 한강 (han river)
북한: one of the names for North Korea
북한산: mountain (산) on the north of 한 (again referring 한강)