Sino-Korean word bridge: TOPIK I hanja

About the Sino-Korean word bridge

More than half of the words in a Korean dictionary come from Chinese characters (hanja). If you read Chinese, Japanese or Vietnamese, you already know many of these characters by sound, and the Korean sound follows regular patterns. This page lists 371 words from the TOPIK I vocabulary (162 at level 1 and 209 at level 2) that are written with hanja, built from 423 different characters.

What each card shows

• The Korean word split into its characters: the hanja, the Korean sound of each one and the reading you may know, either pinyin (Chinese), on-yomi (Japanese) or Hán-Việt (Vietnamese).
• For Chinese and Japanese, the simplified or new-style form when it differs from the traditional character.
• The meaning in your language and other words that share the same character, so one character helps you learn several words.
• A 20-word quiz: you see the characters and choose the Korean word.

Sources and limits

Characters, pinyin and on-yomi come from the Unicode Unihan database (version 18.0). The Hán-Việt readings were checked against Unihan, the Hán Việt dictionary at hvdic.thivien.net and Wiktionary: 380 of the 423 characters are confirmed, and the rest are marked with an asterisk for review. Readings are a memory aid, not a guarantee: the meaning of a word can differ between the languages, so always read the meaning shown on the card.