All phrases

얼마예요?

eolmayeyo?

How much is it?

Why this spelling

This romanisation is not the spelling copied letter by letter. It is built from the National Institute of Korean Language’s Revised Romanization, which writes what the word sounds like once the sounds next to each other have changed it.

When you would say it

The answer arrives in Sino numbers grouped by 만, so catch that word first and the rest falls into place.

Big numbers break every four digits

A written number gets a comma every three digits, and English reads those groups off directly: thousand, million, billion. Korean groups by four instead. The first step up is 만, and it behaves like a unit of its own rather than like "ten thousand".

From the same chapter

Two Number Systems

Card number 17 of the book

The guidebook prints these as numbered cards, so you can hold up a number instead of trying to pronounce it. The Korean edition comes with it and has the same numbers in the same places.

See the guidebook