Mastery stories
Original Korean stories written for this level, with comprehension questions.
Short stories
36 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
사랑방의 독자
In a nobleman's house in 1880s Seoul, a stern old minister orders his son-in-law to find out who is writing the scandalous novel passing around the women's quarters.
아빠의 아재 개그
A daughter who has groaned at her father's puns all her life sits with him in hospital the night before his stomach surgery.
삼천 원어치 꼬막
A young man from Seoul goes to the market in Suncheon to repay a fifty-year-old debt from his late grandfather's notebook, and the cockle seller has a story to tell.
지하 주차장의 가수
A post on an apartment community board asks who is singing in the underground car park every midnight, and the comments take over.
밤과 밤 사이
A translator preparing an English anthology of women poets of the Joseon era cannot find a way to carry one pun across (the sijo in this chapter is an original poem written for the course).
십이 장에서 죽지 않겠습니다
A crime novelist plans to kill off his detective in chapter twelve, and finds lines in his manuscript that he did not write.
마지막 변사
In 1935 Gyeongseong, the most famous silent-film narrator of a Jongno cinema gives his last performance before the talkies arrive.
유언장 제7조
Three siblings who haven't spoken for seven years meet at a lawyer's office in Daejeon to hear their mother's will, which has an unusual clause.
은젓가락이 검어진 저녁
In a Joseon palace kitchen, a veteran royal cook is accused of poisoning the king's supper when the taster's silver chopsticks turn black.
문어와 피자
At their father's first memorial rite in a Pohang fishing town, his children fight in thick Gyeongsang dialect over what belongs on the offering table.
새벽 한 시 십칠 분
A woman in a Mangwon-dong studio flat lies awake from one in the morning until dawn, and her thoughts keep circling back to something she did yesterday.
마리안 소만의 말뚝
A glaciologist wintering at King Sejong Station in Antarctica goes looking for a marker her late father left at the edge of the ice thirty years ago.
밭담 앞의 두 사람
A graduate student goes to the small island of Gapado to record the last two fluent speakers of its old Jeju speech, who have not spoken to each other in forty years.
마지막 반집
In his televised retirement game against a teenage prodigy, an old baduk master plays a move the AI win-rate graph says is a blunder.
새출발 피시방
In 1998, after the financial crisis costs him his bank job, a forty-six-year-old manager opens an internet café in Sillim-dong without knowing anything about games.
공룡능선의 하룻밤
A mountain rescuer in Seoraksan spends a windy December night on a ridge with an injured seventy-two-year-old hiker who told his wife he was going to the bathhouse.
묻지 않은 질문
A court-appointed lawyer in Seoul defends a delivery rider accused of a hit-and-run, and the only witness swears she heard him shout.
기본형 할머니
In 2039 a young woman pays a company to rebuild her late grandmother's voice from years of phone calls, and then the voice says something new.
두 개의 서울
A man who was ten in the Olympic summer of 1988 goes back to the apartment block his father helped build, and finds it rebuilt behind a glass door.
별점 다섯 개의 장례식장
The MBA son of a Daejeon funeral-hall owner brings customer surveys and star ratings to the family business, with darkly comic results.
암자의 와이파이
The founder of a struggling meditation app spends three days at a mountain hermitage, pitching his product to an old monk who answers in riddles.
명절 방어 세트, 지금 주문하세요
A live home-shopping show sells a kit of ready-made answers to relatives' nosy holiday questions, until a mother phones in.
찍지 않은 사진
In a fragment of her memoir, a retired war correspondent remembers a boy selling water at a checkpoint who asked her to take his picture.
거꾸로 박힌 활자
Digitising newspapers from the 1970s, an archivist finds a typo the software wants to correct, and takes it to her grandfather, who once set type by hand.
간판 고치는 선생님
A retired Korean teacher in Gangneung corrects every misspelt shop sign in his neighbourhood, until a young chicken-shop owner argues back.
시장에서 부른 소리
A prize-winning young pansori singer goes to an old master in Namwon, who sends her to sing to a waterfall for a hundred days and then somewhere harder.
재단 초크로 쓴 글자
In 1972 a fifteen-year-old girl from the countryside goes to work in a cramped garment workshop by the Cheonggyecheon, where the seamstress beside her has an unusual use for tailor's chalk.
김포에 내리는 비
The script of one episode of a 1966 live radio serial, in which a miner bound for West Germany waits at the airport, and the director's notes in the margins tell a second story.
이름을 고치러 온 사람
An old name-maker in Sinchon, used to choosing names for babies, is visited by a woman of forty-eight who wants to replace the name her parents gave her.
새벽 네 시의 경매장
A retired detective who now drives a forklift at a Busan fish market notices that one young bidder keeps winning the same box at very odd prices.
아파트 단지 단톡방의 인류학적 고찰
A mock academic paper studies the residents' group chat of a large apartment complex as if it were a tribe, with rituals, taboos and a chief.
공가
Three days before an old public apartment block is demolished, a woman checks every empty flat and sprays a red mark on each door, until one flat seems to know her.
여백의 연쇄 법칙
A student buys a secondhand calculus textbook for five thousand won and finds that two earlier readers once shared it, and wrote far more than calculus in its margins.
초랭이의 입
A burnt-out Seoul office worker becomes an apprentice in the Hahoe mask dance in Andong and is cast as the cheeky servant who mocks the aristocrats, a part he cannot seem to play.
옥이네 순댓국 방문자 리뷰
Thirteen years of online reviews of a small blood-sausage soup shop near Songjeong Station in Gwangju tell the story of its sharp-tongued owner, her son, and her customers.
안녕히 계세요
On the last day of her thirty-one years teaching Korean to foreigners in Seoul, a teacher plans to end her final class with the very first lesson she ever taught.
Nonfiction
4 original articles: explainers, news-style pieces, columns and workplace texts, each with a comprehension check.
가로등 민원 처리 결과 알림
An old man asks his district office to fix one broken streetlight, and the office answers him in a growing pile of official letters.
Satire
그리움에 대하여
When her seven-year-old niece asks what the word for longing means, a woman from Gangneung goes looking for the answer in her own life.
Essay
말뚝이, 건물주 나리를 모시다
A mask-dance scene in which the cheeky servant Malttugi helps a building-owning gentleman raise the rent, until the gentleman's own son wants to open a café.
Mask-dance play
곶감의 정체
The old tale of the tiger who fears a dried persimmon, retold for grown-ups as a story about power, rumour and fear.
Fable