Current Affairs and Political Vocabulary
To understand political articles, you need vocabulary about government structure, the legislative process, and elections. Most of these words are Sino-Korean, so recognizing their building blocks makes them easy to infer.
Branches of Power
| Word | Romanization | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| ํ์ ๋ถ | haengjeongbu | the executive branch |
| ์ ๋ฒ๋ถ / ๊ตญํ | ipbeopbu / gukhoe | the legislature / National Assembly |
| ์ฌ๋ฒ๋ถ | sabeopbu | the judiciary |
| ์ฌ๋น / ์ผ๋น | yeodang / yadang | ruling party / opposition party |
Legislation and Policy
๊ตญํ๋ ๋ณธํ์์์ ํด๋น ๋ฒ์์ ํ๊ฒฐ์ ๋ถ์ณ ์ฌ์ ์์ ๊ณผ๋ฐ ์ฐฌ์ฑ์ผ๋ก ๊ฐ๊ฒฐํ๋ค.
gukhoeneun bonhoeuieseo haedang beobaneul pyogyeore buchyeo jaeseok uiwon gaban chanseongeuro gagyeolhaetda.
The National Assembly put the bill to a vote in plenary session and passed it with a majority of members present in favor.
์ผ๋น์ ์ ๋ถ์ ์ธ๊ต ์ ์ฑ
์ ๊ฐํ๊ฒ ๊ทํํ๋ฉฐ ์ฅ๊ด ํด์์ ์ด๊ตฌํ๋ค.
yadangeun jeongbuui oegyo jeongchaegeul ganghage gyutanhamyeo janggwan haeimeul chokguhaetda.
The opposition strongly denounced the government's foreign policy and called for the minister's dismissal.
๋ํต๋ น์ ๊ฑฐ๋ถ๊ถ์ ํ์ฌํด ๋ฒ์์ ๊ตญํ๋ก ๋๋ ค๋ณด๋๋ค.
daetongryeongeun geobugwoneul haengsahae beobaneul gukhoero dollyeobonaetda.
The president exercised the veto and sent the bill back to the Assembly.
Frequent Verbs and Idioms
| Expression | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ์ด๊ตฌํ๋ค | to urge, call for |
| ๊ทํํ๋ค | to denounce, condemn |
| ์ฒ ํํ๋ค | to withdraw, retract |
| ๊ณต๋ฐฉ์ ๋ฒ์ด๋ค | to engage in a heated dispute |
Election and Public Opinion Vocabulary
| Word | Romanization | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| ์ถ๋ง / ๊ณต์ฒ | chulma / gongcheon | running for office / party nomination |
| ์ง์ง์จ | jijiyul | approval/support rating |
| ๊ฐํ / ๋ํ | gaepyo / deukpyo | ballot counting / winning votes |
| ๋ถ๋์ธต | budongcheung | swing/undecided voters |
๋ํต๋ น ๊ตญ์ ์ง์ง์จ์ด ์ทจ์ ํ ์ฒ์์ผ๋ก 30%๋๋ก ๋ด๋ ค์์๋ค.
daetongryeong gukjeong jijiyuri chwiim hu cheoeumeuro 30%daero naeryeoanjatda.
The president's governance approval rating fell into the 30s for the first time since inauguration.
์ฌ๋น ์ง๋๋ถ๋ ์ด์ ์ ์๋๊ณ ์์ ์นด๋๋ฅผ ๊บผ๋ด ๋ค์๋ค.
yeodang jidobuneun chongseoneul apdugo swaesin kadeureul kkeonae deureotda.
Ahead of the general election, the ruling party leadership played the reform card.
๐ก Tip: The root '-๋ถ (้จ)' means a department or agency, and '-๊ถ (ๆฌ)' means a right or power. Once you know these Sino-Korean units, you can break apart words like '๊ฑฐ๋ถ๊ถ' (veto) and '์ ๋ฒ๋ถ' (the legislature).