How to say the days of the week in Korean

So you're jamming along to 7 Days a Week by Jung Kook (don't worry, we don't judge here) and it occurs to you that you don't know how to say the days of the week in Korean.

Today, we're gonna fix that. 🫡

[Table] Days of the Week in Korean 📕✏️

Here's a table with each of the days of the week in both English and Korean.

Hanja are no longer used in North or South Korea (beyond for names in official documents), so you don't need to worry about that last column... but it'll help us a bit in this next section ꜜꜜꜜ

Remember the Korean days of the week with these mnemonics!

While Korea does not use any Hanja anymore—even native speakers don't really know them—we can make convenient use of them here. As we touch on in our post on the Korean alphabet, each hanja means something.

And since each day of the week ends in 요일 ("day of the week"), all you have to do to remember them is figure out a way to remember the part of the weekday that comes before 요일.

And Hanja will help us do just that.

In the below table:

This particular "see-link-go" mnemonic technique comes from 6x USA Memory Champion Nelson Dellis. If you're struggling to remember one of the days in Korean, don't just read the sentence: close your eyes, really imagine the description I've given you, and ham it up even further!

Some phrases and bonus Korean vocabulary related to the days of the week...

Since you Googled something related to learning the days of the week, here's some other words related to time in Korean you might also be interested in:

And now here's a few Korean phrases so you can see how these vocabulary get used with the days of the week:

[Plot twist] Don't go out of your way to learn the Korean days—here's why

... This is kind of awkward.

There are two big reason for this:

#2 is especially important, so we built a course around the most common ~1,200 Korean vocabulary words. While native speakers know tens of thousands of words, learning the top 1,000 will let you recognize 80% of the words that appear in Korean sentences. (Statistics, man! It's like magic.)

Oh—and, as you might imagine, the days of the week are pretty common words. They're included in our course. Here's how we teach them:

The thing is, we don't teach weekdays until lesson 123. When we ran the data, it was clear that there was a lot of other stuff worth learning first. When you eventually do get to the weekdays, you'll learn them via flashcards that include images, example sentences, and audio from a native Korean speaker.

What's unique about Migaku's Korean Academy is that each "next" sentence in our course contains only one new word, ensuring that you're always learning something new but never overwhelmed.

I'm biased, of course, but it's pretty cool 👍

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Remember: The best way to practice your Korean skills is by interacting with the language

If you really want to learn Korean, you need to understand this Golden Rule of Language Learning:

So—hot take—don't go out of your way to master the days of the week, the months in Korean, Korean numbers, or anything like that.

As you spend more time in Korean, that stuff will sink in and become second nature.

Good luck, friend! 💜