Cracking the Korean Number System
Korean numbers are kinda… weird. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. That 3์กฐ์ development project in ์ฉ๊ถํฌ? Most people learning Korean see that and their brain just stops working. Mine did too for a long time.
The thing is, Korean numbers aren’t just different vocabulary for the same system we use in English. Korean speakers actually group digits completely differently.
Numbers from the Headlines
- “์ฉ๊ถํฌ ๋ง๋ฆฌ๋ ์ํฐ ์ผ์๋ฆฌ 2๋ง๊ฐ ์ฐฝ์ถ ํจ๊ณผ”
- “ํํ๊ฑด์ค ํฌ์ ๊ท๋ชจ 3์กฐ์ ํ์ ”
- “์ด์ ๋ณด์๊ธ 300์ต์ ์ฑ ์ ”
- “๊ฐ๋ฐ ๋ฉด์ 847๋งใก ๊ท๋ชจ”
- “์ฌ์ ๊ธฐ๊ฐ 8๋ ์์ ์์”
The Mental Math Problem
When I first started reading Korean financial news, I kept trying to convert everything back to English numbers. See 3์กฐ์, think “Okay, that’s 3 trillion won, which is about 2.3 billion dollars which is…” and by that point I’d lost track of what I was reading.
Koreans don’t do that conversion. They see 3์กฐ์ and think “major government project scale.” The number category tells them the significance level without any math.
์ฒ๋ง์ต์กฐ
This handy little tool shows you both systems simultaneously. The colored backgrounds reveal where Korean speakers naturally break numbers apart, while the familiar commas show the English groupings you’re used to. When the colors don’t align with the commas, that’s your brain getting rewired.
The Pronunciation Secret
Did you notice in the tool above that the ๋ง place doesn’t show “์ผ” for “1๋ง?”
Korean almost always says just ๋ง for 10,000, not “์ผ๋ง,” and does so until 20,000, where it changes to “์ด๋ง.”
That being said, we do say ์ผ์ต and ์ผ์กฐ for the bigger tiers – ๋ง is the special one.
Why We Need Big Numbers
The Korean grouping system is perfect for the amounts that commonly appear in Korean business transactions, seeing as the Korean won has mostly hovered around 1,000์ to 1 US dollar.
If you look at it, it’s not actually that hard – the vocabulary of Korean groups numbers by four places into tiers instead of three. English breaks up tiers at thousands, millions, billions, trillions, and so on, up to 3 places, 999 (nine hundred and ninety-nine) before moving up to the next tier.
The 4-Place Rule
The system doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe 20,000 as 200 hundreds, even though that’s technically correct. We look to the commas to break up the tiers and make numbers much easier to read.
Let’s keep working with the number 20,000, but move on to Korean. If you’ve been paying attention, you can probably see an immediate problem – we have to change where the next tier starts.
๋ง์ธ!
If you’ve ever heard the expression “๋ง์ธ!” (English speakers will probably be more familiar with its imperialist Japanese equivalent “bonzai!”) this expression is meant to say “(may the current dynasty last for) 10,000 years!”
These days it’s more commonly used to command someone to “reach for the sky” when posing for photos or playing games with children.
The Number Tiers
Keeping in mind our 4-places rule, this means that each tier can go up to 9999, the ์ฒ value.
So when counting ๋ง, we can count up to 9999,9999, which is 9999๋ง 9999์ (9์ฒ 9๋ฐฑ 9์ญ 9๋ง 9์ฒ 9๋ฐฑ 9์ญ 9์) (99,999,999์, in writing.)
Add one more, and we move up to the next tier: ์ต.
Understanding ์ต (100 Million)
In standard 3-place grouping that English uses, ์ต is “100 million”, but you can also think of it as “10 thousand ๋ง” (or ๋ง ๋ง – see how that works?)
A Big Number Example
After we take this tier to its limits, we move up into the final tier that matters for pretty much all normal use cases – ์กฐ.
์กฐ would be 1๋ง ์ต, or 10 thousand 100 millions, or 1,000,000,000,000 – one trillion.
Feels like a gigantic number – and it is – but, when talking about big projects and government programs, it’s pretty reasonable. 1์กฐ์ is valued at about 700 million USD at the time of writing in 2025, though it hovers between there and a billion dollars, so you can safely assume it’s “around a billion” dollars.
Practical Numbers Shortlist
For most things in your everyday life, you’re only going to be dealing with numbers up to the ์ต range.
Numbers in the ์ฉ๊ถํฌ Story
Why These Numbers Matter
The ์ฉ๊ถํฌ story gives you all these scales to practice with:
The juxtaposition of these enormous sums of money against their modest lives should make it clearer why some families support the destruction of their community even though it will change everything about their lives.
Reading Korean Financial Headlines
Numbers as Signals
But the real skill is learning to read these numbers as signals about story significance rather than just quantities to calculate.
Korean financial reporting uses numbers as shorthand for impact levels that regular readers recognize automatically:
(ํ๊ตญ ์ซ์)
The numbers tell you what kind of story you’re reading and how much attention to pay. This takes practice, but once you start thinking in Korean number categories, financial news becomes much more readable.
Plus, these are the same systems used in the rest of East Asia, all thanks to ํ์.
The ์ฉ๊ถํฌ development controversy covers every major scale you’ll encounter in Korean news. Government budgets, business investments, community impact, individual wealth. By the time you finish following this story, you’ll have seen how Korean numbers work in context across different types of reporting.
The goal isn’t to become fluent in Korean math, but to build an intuitive understanding of the value of different “big numbers” in Korean. This will pay off in tons of different contexts.
Moving Forward with ์ฉ๊ถํฌ
As this controversy develops, you’ll notice how different news sources use these number scales to frame the story differently.
Individual interest stories will highlight the 300์ต์ personal payouts – the human scale of generational wealth.
Each perspective uses numbers to signal what scale of impact matters most to their argument.