In Korean, there are two counting systems: Sino-Korean (Chinese System) and Native Korean (Korean System).
CONTENTS
When to Use Each Counting System
Roughly speaking, we can use the two counting systems as the following table.
| Sino-Korean | Native-Korean |
|---|---|
| 0 - infinite | 1 - 99 |
| large numbers | small numbers |
| time: minutes, seconds days, months, years phone numbers currency amounts etc. | time: hour ("o'clock") age counting things: e.g. 3 apples, 5 dogs, 7 people etc. |
Sino-Korean takes less time to pronounce the numbers, so maybe that's one of the reasons to use it for the large numbers.
Since Sino-Korean System is based on Chinese numbers, some of them have similar sounds to them. Below are a few examples of them. Click the Korean and Chinese Characters and they will pronounce them.
Basic: 0 and 1 to 10
In Sino-Korean, 0 is 영 (yeong) or 공 (gong) as "zero" or "oh" in English respectively. On the other hand, 빵 (bbang) is used to count zero in Native-Korean.
From 1 to 10, each system goes as the following table.
From 10 to 19
From 10 to 19, both Sino-Korean and Native-Korean pronounce the numbers with the combination of "10 + number." For example, 11 is "10 (십) + 1(이)," 15 is "10 (십) + 5 (오)," and so on.
From 20, both count the same way. But Native-Korean has a distinctive name for 20, 30, 40, ..., 90, and 100. It's explained in the following paragraph.
10, 20, 30, ..., 100
Sino-Korean counts "number + 10," but Native-Korean has different sound for each numbers.
After 100
After 100, the numbers are the combination of the above-mentioned numbers. Plus, we will have new numbers like "1000 (천) and 10000 (만)" that will also be keys to count large numbers.
(Just for clarity, I put a space between the Hangul in the below table, but we don't need the spaces in a real situation.)