30 Signs I’ve Found In South Korea That Made Me Laugh Out Loud

Even though Korea uses a completely different language and alphabet than English, it's not that hard to live, work, and travel here. Actually, there's a lot of English in Korea. Public transport has English announcements and signs. Restaurants often have English menus. Signposts and maps have English directions and names on them. Even Korea's biggest groups are singing in English these days! That makes it really easy to live and travel in Korea.

There's a growing number of English speakers in Korea and a lot of Koreans are eager to practice English. I sometimes get random strangers to work up enough courage to ask me a few questions and start a conversation in English. I really appreciate their effort to learn my language and I'm doing my best to learn theirs, too.

You might not know it, but Korea is a country that has fully embraced English and mixed it in with its own language. There are hundreds of loan words from English used in Korean that make it a lot easier to live in Korea as an expat. I can drink "ko-pi" (coffee), eat "ke-ki" (cake), and watch "ti-bi" (TV) in my "a-pa-tu" (apartment) whilst using my "su-ma-tu-pon" (smartphone).

English is also a mandatory subject all the way till the end of high school and even at university students still learn some English. I should know, as I teach them it. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that everyone knows how to speak English and use English correctly. This leads to a lot of 'Konglish' mistakes. Konglish is a mix of Korean and English and is used to describe those happy moments of confusion for English speakers when trying to decipher Korean signs, images, or slogans. From the summer b***h (beach) festival to delicious c**p (crab) salad, there are so many funny ways that the earnest efforts of Korean sign-writers, shop owners, and poster makers end up with the wrong outcome.

One common cause of Konglish comes from a lack of letters in the Korean alphabet. There are several English letters not in the Korean alphabet, including f, v, and z. Some letters are also confusing as they have very similar sounds, such as b/p, l/r, and g/k. This turns crab into c**p and hello into herro.

The most common cause of Konglish mistakes is sadly due to a lack of care to check the mistranslations or too much reliance on not-yet-perfect translation apps. Korean words are based on groups of syllables and those syllables can have many meanings. This leads to some unusual Konglish translations, such as "enemy cabbage" instead of "red cabbage". Other times English seems to have been written almost randomly, with no real thought for what the sign says at all, leading to a random stream of words that have very little real meaning. It's kind of artistic, but also very confusing if you need to actually understand the translation.

If you want to find Konglish signs, the most common places are toilets (they really want foreigners to understand Korean toilet culture), clothes shops (fashion fails are strong in Korea), cafes and restaurants (so many bad menu translations), and in stationery stores. When you travel to Korea, look out for any funny signs and see if you can work out what the Konglish means.

Most English speakers in Korea get so used to seeing these translation fails that you sometimes end up not even noticing them. I don't think many people get angry unless it's something really important that hasn't been translated well and ends up putting you in danger. Most of the time they're pretty harmless, sometimes they're hilarious, which is a good thing as it brightens up your day.

There are so many signs saying “Grand Open” (not opening) or “1th Anniversary” (not 1st) that foreigners just shake their heads and get on with their day. At least half of the shops in Korea have “close” signs (not closed) and there's really no escaping Konglish.

If there's a really funny Konglish sign that appears in a popular place, it'll definitely get shared all over social media by Korean expats. Facebook groups like Every Expat In Korea is a good place to find some of these pictures. The Summer B***h Festival was a classic example that still comes up from time to time on expat groups.

These Konglish fails don't get shared on Korean media, probably because it's a bit embarrassing for people and they don't want to discourage people from using English. On social media, however, you can find them posted by influencers or people's personal accounts quite often.

City-based Facebook groups usually share local Konglish mistakes. Recently, a large department store in my city (Daejeon) posted a big sign advertising their "42th year" sale. Some expats shared pictures of it (including me) and within a couple of days the sign was taken down and changed. Sadly, most don't get corrected and the same mistakes keep popping up... but that's great for people like me who love to share them with everyone else.

I lived in Japan for 3 years before coming to Korea and saw a lot of hilarious English signs there, too. Japanese and Korean share similar problems when translating into English, such as the confusion between R and L in both countries. I saw a shop called "Eye Rashes" (not lashes) in Japan, which sounds painful! The grammar structure is very similar in both languages, which is backward from English, so that causes a lot of weird sentences and translation mistakes. There's a kid's clothing chain called 'Starvations' in Japan, which is a really weird name for children's clothing. Japan is another great place for spotting these kinds of signs and I wish I'd taken more pictures of them when I lived there.