Beat the heat 🥵 (or complain about it) with these Korean words!

As you may or may not have noticed, it's summer. 😎 And for some places (cough Seoul cough), it's ridiculously hot and everywhere feels like a 찜질방 (Korean sauna).

So, crank the A/C, grab a jug of cold 식혜 (sweet rice drink, perfect after a nice sweat in the 찜질방) and let's chat about the heat. 🥵

Real-life image of Tokki melting in the Seoul heat

How to talk about the heat

The first, and easiest way to say that it's hot, is to use the word: 덥다 (to be hot)

It's really common to say something like:

아... 진짜 더워... = Ah... it's really hot... 

Or you can say that there is a 폭염 (heatwave) coming soon.

폭염이 온다는데 = A heat wave is coming

But sometimes, we want to describe the specific type of heat that we are experiencing. It may be hot, but if it is also humid (i.e., the worst kind of heat), you could use:

푹푹 찐다 = 푹푹 (completely or extremely) + 찌다 (to steam, in the present tense declarative form (i.e., is steaming))

찜통 더위 = 찜통 (찜 = steam, 통 = container, a steamer) + 더위 (heat)

So, say your friend was like "Hey, let's go play some football outside!" You could say:

이렇게 푹푹 찌는데? 🤔 = In this completely steaming hot weather?

Quick grammar tips!

There are two hot grammar points (you bet that pun was intended) in that sentence: 이렇게 and 찌는데.

The first point comes from the word 이렇다 (such, of this kind, like this) + -게, which turns it into an adverb. It's relatively common to use 이렇게 to say something is being done "in a certain way". 

이렇게 해요 = do it like this

이렇게 먹어요 = eat like this

이렇게 앉아요 = sit like this

The second point uses the base word 찌다 (to steam) + -는데, which is a modifier to provide information or information of a background situation. Essentially, it provides a current state of things, but can be used to introduce a second clause. That might be a bit confusing, so let's look at some examples:

배고픈데, 밥 먹을까요? = I'm hungry, so should we eat?

비가 오는데, 집에 가자. = It's raining, so let's go home.

너무 매운데. = It's really spicy.

Another way Koreans talk about the heat is one of my favorites:

더위 먹었어 = I ate the heat

Yep, that's right. If it is so hot outside, you can say: "아...진짜...더위 먹었어...". It's almost like you're sick from the heat because you ate it. 

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Escaping or embracing the heat

There are definitely a few schools of thought when it comes to dealing with the heat. You have people that need to seek the relief of air conditioning, and those that embrace the heat, even doubling-down by eating hot foods.

For the first kind of people (myself included), if it is a 열대야 (열대 Sino-Korean for tropical + 야 Sino-Korean for night, a very humid night) you might say:

에어컨 필요해 = I need air-conditioning

Or maybe once you come back home, you enter the A/C and say:

아....시원하다 = Ah...so cool...

아...다행이다 = Ah...such relief / thank god...

But if you're the other kind of person, eating hot and spicy foods while it's blistering out, you just need to shrug your shoulders and say a pretty famous Korean idiom:

이열치열 = Fight fire with fire

Korean culture tidbit!

It's actually really common to eat 삼계탕 (ginseng chicken soup, in Sino-Korean) during 복날 (combination of 복, Sino-Korean to "lie low" and 날 (day)) which are the hottest days of the year determined by the lunar calendar. They're usually mid-July to mid-August.

The three days are 초복 (beginning of the hottest time), 중복 (middle of the hottest days), and 말복 (the last of the hottest days). There are typically between 10 and 20 days between each of the three 복.

So, on each of these significant days, it's typical to eat 삼계탕, sweat a lot to help your body cool itself down and replenish nutrients that you may have lost during that time.

삼계탕 - perfect for 이열치열