How Many Korean Particles Are There?

Korean particles are the small words, like 은 (eun), 이 (i) or 에서 (eseo), that you attach to the end of a noun to show what job it does in the sentence. While I was planning new lessons for this site, I wanted to know how many of them there are in total, so I’d know how much was left to cover. I expected to find one number, but it turns out the answer depends on which dictionary you ask.

In this post I’ll go through what Korea’s official dictionaries say, why their numbers are so different from each other, and, more usefully, how many particles and grammar patterns a learner actually needs.

The official numbers

The dictionaries I checked are all made by the National Institute of Korean Language (국립국어원, gungnip gugeowon), the government body in charge of the Korean language. Two of them publish live statistics on their entries, and the institute has published counts for the third. This is how many particles each one has:

The first and last numbers come from the dictionaries’ own statistics pages, which are updated as entries are added. The Standard Korean Dictionary number is from 2008, the most recent count from the institute that I could find.

So depending on where you look, Korean has about 160, 360 or almost 600 particles. That’s a big difference for what sounds like a simple question, so the next thing I wanted to know was why.

Why the numbers are so different

The first reason is that a dictionary counts every form as its own entry. You probably think of 은/는 (eun/neun) as one particle, because it does one job and you just pick the form that fits the word before it. The dictionary, though, has one entry for 은 and another one for 는, and the same goes for 이 and 가, or 을 and 를. That alone nearly doubles the count for the basic particles.

The second reason is that particles that often go together get their own entry too. For example, 에서 (eseo, from) and 부터 (buteo, starting from) can be combined into 에서부터 (eseobuteo), and the dictionary lists that as a separate particle. The same happens with 에게로 (egero, toward someone), which is 에게 (ege) plus 로 (ro).

The third reason is what each dictionary is trying to cover. The Basic Korean Dictionary only includes what a learner is likely to need, while the Standard Korean Dictionary tries to cover the whole language, including old-fashioned and literary forms you’d only see in books. Urimalsaem goes even further, because it also collects dialect words, old Korean and North Korean words, and the public can suggest new entries, so it ends up with the highest number.

There’s one more thing that surprised me. In Korean grammar, 이다 (ida), the “to be” in 학생이에요 (haksaengieyo, I’m a student), is classified as a particle too. Most English textbooks call it a verb or “the copula,” so you might never think of it as a particle, but that’s how Korean dictionaries list it.

Particles are only part of the grammar

When English speakers say “Korean particles,” they often include things that Korean grammar puts in a different group. Particles attach to nouns, but there’s a second set of pieces that attach to verbs and adjectives, and those are called endings (어미, eomi). For example, the 지만 (jiman, but) in 비싸지만 (bissajiman, it’s expensive, but) is an ending, and so is the 고 (go, and) in 먹고 (meokgo, I eat and).

This is also why the same syllable can be two different things. 는 (neun) after a noun, as in 저는 (jeoneun, as for me), is the topic particle, but 는 after a verb, as in 먹는 사람 (meongneun saram, a person who’s eating), is an ending.

There are many more endings than particles. The Basic Korean Dictionary has 504 of them, and the Standard Korean Dictionary had 2,517 in 2008. On top of that, there are grammar patterns made of several words, like 는 것 같다 (neun geot gatda, it seems that), and the Basic Korean Dictionary lists 996 of those separately as “grammar and expressions.”

So if you put particles, endings and patterns together, the dictionaries list a few thousand items. Fortunately, nobody needs anywhere near all of them.

How many you actually need

A more useful number comes from somewhere else. The same institute also wrote an official curriculum for teaching Korean as a foreign language, called the International Standard Curriculum for Korean (국제 통용 한국어 표준 교육과정). It splits learning into six levels, from complete beginner to advanced, and lists the grammar a learner should know at each one. That list puts particles, endings and patterns together, and it has 336 items in total:

The first two levels, which are the beginner ones, add up to 90 items, and by the end of the intermediate levels (3 and 4) you’re at 224. I find that a lot more encouraging than 2,500, because it means the grammar you’ll actually use day to day comes down to a few hundred items, not thousands.

Where to start

If you’re just starting out, don’t worry about the big numbers. Begin with the few particles that show up in almost every sentence, which are 은/는 (eun/neun), 이/가 (i/ga), 을/를 (eul/reul) and 에/에서 (e/eseo). Once those feel natural, the rest are much easier to pick up as you run into them, and you’ll find all of them in the particle library, grouped by what they do.

Every lesson on this site also links to its entry in the Basic Korean Dictionary, so if you ever want to check what I say against the official source, it’s one click away.

So which particle has given you the most trouble so far?

Sources

• Basic Korean Dictionary statistics (National Institute of Korean Language)
• Urimalsaem statistics (National Institute of Korean Language)
• Standard Korean Dictionary entries by part of speech, 1999 and 2008 (National Institute of Korean Language)
• The International Standard Curriculum for Korean and its 336 grammar items (새국어생활, 2018)