๐Ÿ”‘์‚ฌ๋ฌด์‹ค ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด์˜ ํ–‰๊ฐ„ ์ฝ๊ธฐ? the hidden meanings behind office Korean! ๊ฒ€ํ† ํ•ด๋ณด๊ฒ ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค?

ํ•œ๊ตญ ์ง์žฅ ์ƒํ™œ์˜ ๋น„๋ฐ€: ์‚ฌ๋ฌด์‹ค ์šฉ์–ด์˜ ํ–‰๊ฐ„ ์ฝ๊ธฐ | Super Real Korean

ํ•œ๊ตญ ์ง์žฅ ์ƒํ™œ์˜ ๋น„๋ฐ€
์‚ฌ๋ฌด์‹ค ์šฉ์–ด์˜ ํ–‰๊ฐ„ ์ฝ๊ธฐ

The Secret to Korean Office Life: Reading Between the Lines of Office Terminology

Korean office communication reading between lines

ํ•œ๊ตญ ์ง์žฅ ์ƒํ™œ์—์„œ ์‚ฌ์šฉ๋˜๋Š” ์‚ฌ๋ฌด์‹ค ์šฉ์–ด๋Š” ๋‹จ์ˆœํ•œ ๋‹จ์–ด ๊ทธ ์ด์ƒ์˜ ์˜๋ฏธ๋ฅผ ๋‚ดํฌํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒฝ์šฐ๊ฐ€ ๋งŽ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ํŠนํžˆ, ์˜ˆ์˜์™€ ์กด์ค‘์„ ์ค‘์‹œํ•˜๋Š” ํ•œ๊ตญ ๋ฌธํ™”์˜ ํŠน์„ฑ์ƒ ์ง์ ‘์ ์ธ ํ‘œํ˜„๋ณด๋‹ค๋Š” ์™„๊ณกํ•˜๊ณ  ๊ฐ„์ ‘์ ์ธ ํ‘œํ˜„์„ ์„ ํ˜ธํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒฝํ–ฅ์ด ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋”ฐ๋ผ์„œ ์™ธ๊ตญ์ธ์œผ๋กœ์„œ ํ•œ๊ตญ ์ง์žฅ ๋ฌธํ™”์— ์ ์‘ํ•˜๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•ด์„œ๋Š” ์ด๋Ÿฌํ•œ ์‚ฌ๋ฌด์‹ค ์šฉ์–ด์˜ ํ–‰๊ฐ„์„ ์ฝ๊ณ  ์ˆจ๊ฒจ์ง„ ์˜๋ฏธ๋ฅผ ํŒŒ์•…ํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ด ์ค‘์š”ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

In Korean workplace culture, office terminology often carries meanings beyond their literal definitions. Especially considering the Korean culture's emphasis on etiquette and respect, indirect and subtle expressions are preferred over direct ones. Therefore, for foreigners to adapt to the Korean workplace culture, it is crucial to read between the lines of these office terminologies and understand their hidden meanings.

๐Ÿค” ๋งˆ์ดํฌ์˜ ๊ณ ๋ฏผ | Mike's Dilemma

๋ฏธ๊ตญ์—์„œ ์˜จ ๋งˆ์ดํฌ๋Š” ํ•œ๊ตญ ํšŒ์‚ฌ์— ์ทจ์งํ•œ ์ง€ ์–ผ๋งˆ ๋˜์ง€ ์•Š์•˜์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋Š” ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด๋ฅผ ๋Šฅ์ˆ™ํ•˜๊ฒŒ ๊ตฌ์‚ฌํ–ˆ์ง€๋งŒ, ์ง์žฅ ๋™๋ฃŒ๋“ค๊ณผ์˜ ์†Œํ†ต์—์„œ ๋ฌ˜ํ•œ ์–ด๋ ค์›€์„ ๋А๋ผ๊ณ  ์žˆ์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Mike, who came from the US, had recently started working at a Korean company. Although he was fluent in Korean, he found communication with his colleagues subtly challenging.

๐Ÿง‘‍๐Ÿ’ผ ๋งˆ์ดํฌ:

๊ทธ๋ ˆ์ด์Šค ์”จ, ํŒ€์žฅ๋‹˜์ด ์ œ๊ฐ€ ์ œ์ถœํ•œ ๋ณด๊ณ ์„œ๋ฅผ ๋ณด์‹œ๊ณ  "์Œ... ๊ฒ€ํ† ํ•ด ๋ณด๊ฒ ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค."๋ผ๊ณ  ํ•˜์…จ๋Š”๋ฐ, ์ด๊ฒŒ ๋ฌด์Šจ ๋œป์ธ๊ฐ€์š”? ์ •๋ง ๊ฒ€ํ† ํ•˜์‹œ๊ฒ ๋‹ค๋Š” ๊ฑด๊ฐ€์š”, ์•„๋‹ˆ๋ฉด ๋ญ”๊ฐ€ ๋ฌธ์ œ๊ฐ€ ์žˆ๋‹ค๋Š” ๋œป์ธ๊ฐ€์š”?

๐Ÿง‘‍๐Ÿ’ผ Mike:

Grace, the team leader looked at the report I submitted and said, "Hmm... I will review it." What does that mean? Does he really intend to review it, or does it mean there's a problem?

๐Ÿ‘ฉ‍๐Ÿญ ๊ทธ๋ ˆ์ด์Šค:

์•„, ๋งˆ์ดํฌ ์”จ. ๊ทธ ํ‘œํ˜„์€ ํ•œ๊ตญ ์ง์žฅ์—์„œ ์•„์ฃผ ํ”ํ•ด์š”. ๋Œ€๋ถ€๋ถ„์˜ ๊ฒฝ์šฐ, ๊ทธ๊ฑด '๊ฑฐ์ ˆ'์ด๋‚˜ '๋ถ€์ •์  ๊ฒ€ํ† '์˜ ๊ฐ€๋Šฅ์„ฑ์ด ๋†’๋‹ค๋Š” ์˜๋ฏธ์˜ˆ์š”. ํŠนํžˆ ๋’ค์— '๊ธ์ •์ ์œผ๋กœ' ๊ฐ™์€ ๋ง์ด ์—†์—ˆ๋‹ค๋ฉด์š”.

๐Ÿ‘ฉ‍๐Ÿญ Grace:

Ah, Mike. That expression is very common in Korean workplaces. In most cases, it likely means a 'rejection' or 'negative review'. Especially if there was no word like 'positively' afterwards.

๐Ÿ”‘ ํ•ต์‹ฌ ํ‘œํ˜„ | Key Expression

๊ฒ€ํ† ํ•ด ๋ณด๊ฒ ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Geomtohae bogetseumnida.)

Literal Meaning: I will review it.

Implied Meaning: Often means "I will not consider it positively" or "I will likely reject it." If no positive modifier like "๊ธ์ •์ ์œผ๋กœ" (positively) is attached, it's usually a polite refusal. TOPIK Level 4+ Culture

๐Ÿ’ก ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด์˜ ๊ฐ„์ ‘์  ํ‘œํ˜„ ์ดํ•ดํ•˜๊ธฐ | Understanding Indirect Expressions in Korean

ํ•œ๊ตญ ๋ฌธํ™”์—์„œ๋Š” ์ƒ๋Œ€๋ฐฉ์˜ ์ฒด๋ฉด์„ ์„ธ์›Œ์ฃผ๊ณ  ์ง์ ‘์ ์ธ ๋ถˆํŽธํ•จ์„ ํ”ผํ•˜๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•ด ๊ฐ„์ ‘์ ์ธ ํ‘œํ˜„์„ ์ž์ฃผ ์‚ฌ์šฉํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ํŠนํžˆ ์ง์žฅ์—์„œ๋Š” ์ด๋Ÿฌํ•œ ๊ฒฝํ–ฅ์ด ๋”์šฑ ๋‘๋“œ๋Ÿฌ์ง‘๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋”ฐ๋ผ์„œ ๋‹จ์–ด ๊ทธ๋Œ€๋กœ์˜ ์˜๋ฏธ๋ณด๋‹ค๋Š” ์ƒํ™ฉ๊ณผ ๋‰˜์•™์Šค๋ฅผ ํŒŒ์•…ํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ด ์ค‘์š”ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

In Korean culture, indirect expressions are often used to save face for the other person and avoid direct discomfort. This tendency is even more pronounced in the workplace. Therefore, understanding the situation and nuances is more important than just the literal meaning of the words.

๐Ÿง‘‍๐Ÿ’ผ ๋งˆ์ดํฌ:

์ •๋ง์š”? ์ €๋Š” ๊ณง ๊ฒ€ํ† ํ•ด์„œ ์ข‹์€ ํ”ผ๋“œ๋ฐฑ์„ ์ฃผ์‹ค ๊ฑฐ๋ผ๊ณ  ์ƒ๊ฐํ–ˆ์–ด์š”! ๋˜ ํ•˜๋‚˜ ๊ถ๊ธˆํ•œ ๊ฒŒ ์žˆ๋Š”๋ฐ, ๋ˆ„๊ฐ€ ์ €ํ•œํ…Œ "์‹œ๊ฐ„ ๋˜์‹œ๋ฉด..."์ด๋ผ๊ณ  ํ•˜๋ฉด ์ •๋ง ์ œ๊ฐ€ ์‹œ๊ฐ„์ด ๋˜๋Š”์ง€ ๋ฌผ์–ด๋ณด๋Š” ๊ฑด๊ฐ€์š”?

๐Ÿง‘‍๐Ÿ’ผ Mike:

Really? I thought they would review it soon and give me good feedback! I have another question, if someone says to me "If you have time..." are they genuinely asking if I have time?

๐Ÿ‘ฉ‍๐Ÿญ ๊ทธ๋ ˆ์ด์Šค:

์•„๋‹ˆ์š”, ๋งˆ์ดํฌ ์”จ. ์ƒ์‚ฌ๊ฐ€ ๊ทธ ํ‘œํ˜„์„ ์ผ๋‹ค๋ฉด ๊ทธ๊ฑด '์ง€๊ธˆ ๋‹น์žฅ ํ•ด๋‹ฌ๋ผ'๋Š” ์˜๋ฏธ์— ๊ฐ€๊นŒ์›Œ์š”. ์˜ˆ์˜๋ฅผ ๊ฐ–์ถ˜ ๋ช…๋ น์ด๋ผ๊ณ  ๋ณด์‹œ๋ฉด ๋ผ์š”. ๐Ÿ˜ฎ

๐Ÿ‘ฉ‍๐Ÿญ Grace:

No, Mike. If a superior uses that expression, it's closer to meaning 'Please do it right now'. You can think of it as a polite command. ๐Ÿ˜ฎ

๐Ÿ”‘ ํ•ต์‹ฌ ํ‘œํ˜„ | Key Expression

์‹œ๊ฐ„ ๋˜์‹œ๋ฉด... (Sigan doesimyeon...)

Literal Meaning: If you have time...

Implied Meaning: Often means "Please do it now" or "This is an urgent request/order." Especially when used by a superior. It's a polite way to give an instruction. TOPIK Level 3+ Business Etiquette

⚠️ ์ฃผ์˜! | Caution!

ํ•œ๊ตญ ์ง์žฅ์—์„œ๋Š” ์ง์ ‘์ ์ธ ๊ฑฐ์ ˆ์ด๋‚˜ ๋ช…๋ น์ด ๋“œ๋ญ…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋”ฐ๋ผ์„œ ์ƒ๋Œ€๋ฐฉ์˜ ํ‘œ์ •, ๋ชฉ์†Œ๋ฆฌ ํ†ค, ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ  ์ƒํ™ฉ์„ ์ข…ํ•ฉ์ ์œผ๋กœ ๊ณ ๋ คํ•˜์—ฌ ์ˆจ๊ฒจ์ง„ ์˜๋ฏธ๋ฅผ ํŒŒ์•…ํ•˜๋Š” ๋Šฅ๋ ฅ์„ ๊ธธ๋Ÿฌ์•ผ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

In Korean workplaces, direct rejections or commands are rare. Therefore, you need to develop the ability to grasp hidden meanings by considering the other person's facial expressions, tone of voice, and the overall situation.

๐Ÿง‘‍๐Ÿ’ผ ๋งˆ์ดํฌ:

์ •๋ง ๋ณต์žกํ•˜๋„ค์š”! ๊ทธ๋Ÿผ ์ง€๋‚œ๋ฒˆ์— ๋ถ€์žฅ๋‹˜์ด ์ €์—๊ฒŒ "๋‹ค์Œ์— ์‹์‚ฌ ํ•œ๋ฒˆ ํ•˜์‹œ์ฃ ."๋ผ๊ณ  ํ•˜์‹  ๊ฑด ์–ธ์ œ์ฏค ์‹์‚ฌํ• ์ง€ ๋‚ ์งœ๋ฅผ ์žก์ž๋Š” ์˜๋ฏธ๊ฐ€ ์•„๋‹ˆ์—ˆ๋‚˜์š”?

๐Ÿง‘‍๐Ÿ’ผ Mike:

It's really complicated! So, when the manager told me "Let's have a meal sometime." last time, did it not mean that we should set a date for a meal?

๐Ÿ‘ฉ‍๐Ÿญ ๊ทธ๋ ˆ์ด์Šค:

ํ์Œ... ๋ณดํ†ต์€ '์ธ์‚ฌ์น˜๋ ˆ'์ผ ๊ฐ€๋Šฅ์„ฑ์ด ๋†’์•„์š”. ์ •๋ง ์‹์‚ฌ๋ฅผ ํ•˜๊ณ  ์‹ถ์œผ์…จ๋‹ค๋ฉด ๊ตฌ์ฒด์ ์ธ ์‹œ๊ฐ„์ด๋‚˜ ๋‚ ์งœ๋ฅผ ์ œ์•ˆํ•˜์…จ์„ ๊ฑฐ์˜ˆ์š”. ํ•œ๊ตญ์—์„œ๋Š” ๊ทธ๋Ÿฐ ๋ง์ด ์ธ์‚ฌ์ฒ˜๋Ÿผ ์‚ฌ์šฉ๋  ๋•Œ๊ฐ€ ๋งŽ๊ฑฐ๋“ ์š”. ๐Ÿ˜Š

๐Ÿ‘ฉ‍๐Ÿญ Grace:

Hmm... usually, it's highly likely just a

๋‹ค์Œ์— ์‹์‚ฌ ํ•œ๋ฒˆ ํ•˜์‹œ์ฃ . (Daeume siksa hanbeon hasijyo.)

Literal Meaning: Let's have a meal together sometime.

Implied Meaning: Often just a polite farewell or a general expression of goodwill, not a concrete invitation. Actual meal plans usually involve suggesting a specific time or place. TOPIK Level 2+ Social Phrases

ํŒ! | Tip!

์ด๋Ÿฐ ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด ์ง์žฅ ํ‘œํ˜„๋“ค์„ ๋” ๊นŠ์ด ์ดํ•ดํ•˜๊ณ  ์‹ถ์œผ์‹ ๊ฐ€์š”? ๋งค์ผ Super Real Korean ๋ธ”๋กœ๊ทธ๋ฅผ ๋ฐฉ๋ฌธํ•˜์—ฌ ์‹ค์šฉ์ ์ธ ํ•™์Šต ์ž๋ฃŒ๋“ค์„ ๋งŒ๋‚˜๋ณด์„ธ์š”!

Want to understand these Korean workplace expressions more deeply? Visit the Super Real Korean blog daily for practical learning materials!

๐Ÿง‘‍๐Ÿ’ผ ๋งˆ์ดํฌ:

์ •๋ง ์œ ์šฉํ•œ ์ •๋ณด๋„ค์š”! ๋งˆ์ง€๋ง‰์œผ๋กœ ํ•˜๋‚˜๋งŒ ๋”์š”. ์ €ํฌ ํŒ€์›์ด ํ”„๋กœ์ ํŠธ์— ๋Œ€ํ•ด ์ œ๊ฐ€ ๋„์›€์„ ์ฃผ๋ ค๊ณ  ํ–ˆ์„ ๋•Œ "์ €ํฌ ์ชฝ์—์„œ ์•Œ์•„์„œ ํ•˜๊ฒ ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค."๋ผ๊ณ  ํ–ˆ๋Š”๋ฐ, ์ด๊ฒƒ๋„ ๋ญ”๊ฐ€ ๋‹ค๋ฅธ ์˜๋ฏธ๊ฐ€ ์žˆ๋‚˜์š”?

๐Ÿง‘‍๐Ÿ’ผ Mike:

This information is really useful! Just one more thing. When I offered to help my team member with the project, they said, "We will take care of it ourselves." Does this also have a different meaning?

๐Ÿ‘ฉ‍๐Ÿญ ๊ทธ๋ ˆ์ด์Šค:

๋„ค, ๋งž์•„์š”. ์ด ํ‘œํ˜„์€ ๋•Œ๋กœ๋Š” '๋” ์ด์ƒ ๊ฐœ์ž…ํ•˜์ง€ ๋ง์•„๋‹ฌ๋ผ'๊ฑฐ๋‚˜ '์ž์‹ ๋“ค์ด ์ฑ…์ž„์ง€๊ณ  ์ฒ˜๋ฆฌํ•˜๊ฒ ๋‹ค'๋Š” ์˜๋ฏธ๋กœ ์‚ฌ์šฉ๋  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์–ด์š”. ๋„์›€์„ ๊ฑฐ์ ˆํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฐ„์ ‘์ ์ธ ํ‘œํ˜„์ด์ฃ . ๐Ÿ˜…

๐Ÿ‘ฉ‍๐Ÿญ Grace:

Yes, that's right. This expression can sometimes mean 'please don't get involved further' or 'they will take responsibility and handle it themselves.' It's an indirect way of refusing help. ๐Ÿ˜…

๐Ÿ”‘ ํ•ต์‹ฌ ํ‘œํ˜„ | Key Expression

์ €ํฌ ์ชฝ์—์„œ ์•Œ์•„์„œ ํ•˜๊ฒ ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Jeohui jjokeseo araseo hagetsseumnida.)

Literal Meaning: We will take care of it ourselves.

Implied Meaning: Can imply a desire for non-interference or a confident assertion that they will handle it without external help. It's an indirect way to say "No, thank you for your help." TOPIK Level 4+ Interpersonal Communication

๐Ÿ’ฌ ์ถ”๊ฐ€ ์–ดํœ˜ | Additional Vocabulary

์˜๊ฒฌ์„ ์ฃผ์‹ญ์‹œ์˜ค. (Uigyeoneul jusipsio.) | Please give your opinion. (Implies: You are expected to give a positive response or agreement.)

๋‹ค์Œ์— ์ด์•ผ๊ธฐํ•˜์‹œ์ฃ . (Daeume iyagihasijyo.) | Let's talk about it next time. (Implies: I do not want to discuss this now, or perhaps ever.)

์ข€ ๋” ๋ณด์™„์ด ํ•„์š”ํ•  ๊ฒƒ ๊ฐ™์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (Jom deo bowani piryohal geot gatseumnida.) | It seems like more supplementation is needed. (Implies: This needs significant revision, or is insufficient.)

⭐ ๊ฒฐ๋ก  | Conclusion

ํ•œ๊ตญ ์ง์žฅ์—์„œ์˜ ์†Œํ†ต์€ ๋‹จ์ˆœํ•œ ์–ธ์–ด ๋Šฅ๋ ฅ ๊ทธ ์ด์ƒ์„ ์š”๊ตฌํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ํ–‰๊ฐ„์„ ์ฝ๋Š” ๋Šฅ๋ ฅ์€ ์˜คํ•ด๋ฅผ ์ค„์ด๊ณ  ์›ํ™œํ•œ ๊ด€๊ณ„๋ฅผ ์œ ์ง€ํ•˜๋Š” ๋ฐ ํ•„์ˆ˜์ ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋งˆ์ดํฌ์˜ ๊ฒฝํ—˜์ฒ˜๋Ÿผ, ์ด๋Ÿฌํ•œ ๋‰˜์•™์Šค๋ฅผ ์ดํ•ดํ•˜๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์€ ์™ธ๊ตญ์ธ์œผ๋กœ์„œ ํ•œ๊ตญ ๋ฌธํ™”์— ์„ฑ๊ณต์ ์œผ๋กœ ์ ์‘ํ•˜๋Š” ์ค‘์š”ํ•œ ์—ด์‡ ๊ฐ€ ๋  ๊ฒƒ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Communication in Korean workplaces demands more than just language proficiency. The ability to read between the lines is essential for minimizing misunderstandings and maintaining smooth relationships. As Mike's experience shows, understanding these nuances will be a crucial key for foreigners to successfully adapt to Korean culture.

๊พธ์ค€ํžˆ ๋ฐฐ์šฐ๊ณ  ๊ด€์ฐฐํ•˜๋ฉฐ ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด ์ปค๋ฎค๋‹ˆ์ผ€์ด์…˜์˜ ์ง„์ •ํ•œ ์ „๋ฌธ๊ฐ€๊ฐ€ ๋˜์„ธ์š”!

Keep learning and observing to become a true expert in Korean communication!

#ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด๊ณต๋ถ€ #KoreanStudy #ํ•œ๊ตญ์ง์žฅ๋ฌธํ™” #KoreanOfficeCulture #ํ–‰๊ฐ„์ฝ๊ธฐ #ReadingBetweenLines #๊ฐ„์ ‘์†Œํ†ต #IndirectCommunication #์‚ฌ๋ฌด์‹ค์šฉ์–ด #OfficeTerminology #์™ธ๊ตญ์ธ์„์œ„ํ•œํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด #KoreanForForeigners #KoreanVocabulary #ํ•œ๊ตญํšŒ์‚ฌ์ ์‘ #เค•ोเคฐिเคฏเคจเค•ाเคฐ्เคฏाเคฒเคฏเคธंเคธ्เค•ृเคคि #EstudiarCoreano #ร‰tudierLeCorรฉen

๐Ÿ˜œ ํ•˜๋ฃจ 5๋ถ„๋งŒ ํˆฌ์žํ•˜๋ฉด ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด๋Š” ๋” ์ด์ƒ ์–ด๋ ต์ง€ ์•Š์•„์š”. ํž˜๋‚ด์š”!

๐Ÿ˜œ Even just 5 minutes a day makes learning Korean easier. Let’s stay strong!

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