Study Korean B1 Vocabulary: 350 Flashcards Ranked by English Frequency

Deck PH1271 — Korean Vocabulary B1: Expanding holds 350 English-to-Korean cards, and the very first thing to notice is the order. It is not Korean difficulty: it is an English frequency list (school, student, family, month, lot, study, book…) with a strong American news register — 대통령, 의회, 정책, 법안, 캠페인, 선거, 변호사 all appear well before everyday words. Know that, and it becomes a fast production drill.

Ten cards from the deck

What you actually cover

Family and body (가족, 아내, 남편, 아들, 딸, 형제, 자매, 머리, 발, 다리, 몸, 심장, 피), school and work (학교, 학생, 대학, 교육, 수업, 학위, 교수, 직업, 회의, 직원, 임원, 관리자), civic and legal Korean (법, 법정, 법안, 법적, 경찰, 군사, 장교, 범죄, 총, 권한, 행정), economy (경제, 시장, 무역, 은행, 주식, 기금, 재정, 비율, 성장, 손실), health (건강, 병원, 의료, 치료, 약, 질병), plus a solid verb set: 듣다, 깨닫다, 던지다, 밀다, 놓다, 걸다, 웃다, 잊다, 즐기다, 도착하다, 발생하다, 비교하다, 증명하다, 논의하다.

The trap: this list was machine-translated with a software bias

Several backs give the computer sense of the word, not the everyday one. Rewrite these before your first session:

• enter → 입력하다 means to type in / input. Entering a room is 들어가다.
• save → 저장하다 is saving a file. Saving money is 모으다, saving a life is 구하다.
• view → 보기 is the noun a viewing / an option; an opinion is 견해 or 관점.
• performance → 성능 is a machine's performance; a concert is 공연.
• top → 상단 is the top of a page; the top of a mountain is 정상, plain "on top" is 맨 위.
• Same pattern for accept → 수락하다 (accepting a request, versus 받아들이다), check → 확인하다, section → 섹션, board → 보드.

And card 267 is literally TV → TV: zero information, and card 265 already gives 텔레비전. Delete it.

Eight collisions make reverse review impossible

One Korean back, several English fronts: 힘 (power, force), 기회 (chance, opportunity), 행동 (action, behavior, act — three cards), 종류 (kind, sort), 전체 (whole, entire), 어려운 (difficult, hard), 현재 (current, present), 환경 (environment, environmental — identical). Keep this deck one-way, English → Korean. Flip it and you will be marked wrong for answers that are perfectly correct.

Two more fixes specific to Korean

Numbers mix both systems silently. seven → 일곱 and eight → 여덟 are native Korean, but ten → 십, hundred → 백 and thousand → 천 are Sino-Korean. Add the missing twin (열/칠/팔): the two systems take different counters.

Adjectives arrive already inflected. 어려운, 가까운, 잘못된, 사적인, 자연스러운 are modifier forms — you cannot end a sentence with them. Rewrite the backs as dictionary forms (어렵다, 가깝다) and let the modifier be the hint. Similarly, 궁금해하다 (wonder) and 그리워하다 (miss) are the -어하다 forms used about other people; about yourself it is 궁금하다 and 그립다.

Study tip that pays off fast: group by Sino-Korean root instead of alphabetically. The deck already gives you 법 → 법, 법정, 법안, 법적, and 학 → 학교, 학생, 대학, 학위. Four cards each become one pattern.

One absence follows from the English source list: the highest-frequency Korean verbs (하다, 있다, 가다, 오다, 먹다, 보다) never get a card. Pair this deck with a grammar deck.

More Korean here: TOPIK I Vocabulary and TOPIK II Vocabulary.

Look for Korean Vocabulary B1: Expanding (deck code PH1271) in your library on Flip It.