TOPIK Vocabulary: The Official NIKL Word Lists and How to Use Them

There is no word list for the test on the TOPIK site. The National Institute of Korean Language (국립국어원, NIKL) does, and its lists are free, official and more useful than most commercial "TOPIK 2,000 words" decks. There are two you should know about:

1. The Korean learner vocabulary list (2003): 5,965 words in three bands, downloadable as Excel, text or Hangul files.
2. The international standard curriculum vocabulary: 10,635 words graded from level 1 to level 6, matching TOPIK's six levels.

We downloaded the 2003 list and tested it against the 102nd TOPIK papers on the official site. Here is what the lists contain, how far they get you, and how to study from them.

The numbers at a glance

The TOPIK centre's own level criteria are the only place the test describes vocabulary size: level 1 builds simple sentences from about 800 basic words, and level 2 handles familiar topics paragraph by paragraph with about 1,500 to 2,000 words. For levels 3 to 6 the criteria describe topics and tasks, not word counts.

The A, B and C bands of the 2003 list are its own three stages. NIKL does not officially map them to TOPIK levels. Treat A as beginner, B as lower intermediate and C as intermediate, and remember the list stops well short of advanced.

List 1: the 2003 learner vocabulary list

NIKL published this list in May 2003. You can download it free from the Downloads section of korean.go.kr (Other Public Sources). It is released under KOGL type 1, so you can reuse it with attribution. The file has five columns:

• 순위 (rank): the word's frequency rank in NIKL's 2002 survey of modern Korean usage
• 단어 (word): with a number when there are homonyms, following the Standard Korean Dictionary (가구03 household is different from 가구04 furniture)
• 품사 (part of speech): one-letter codes, for example 명 noun, 동 verb, 형 adjective, 부 adverb, 의 bound noun
• 풀이 (gloss): a short hint, often the Chinese characters or a collocation (가득 ~ 차다)
• 등급 (grade): A, B or C

What the A band looks like

We counted the 982 A-band words by part of speech:

Half the band is nouns, but the most frequent items are the small words that hold sentences together. Ranks 1 to 10 include 것, 하다, 있다, 되다, 수 and 없다. You meet them in almost every sentence, which is why sorting the list by rank gives a better study order than the alphabetical default.

Tested on a real paper: TOPIK I

We took every content word from questions 31–39 of the 102nd TOPIK I reading paper, both the sentences and all four options, and looked each one up. These questions ask you to name the topic of two short sentences or fill one gap.

• 44 of 48 words were in the A band. Family, age, date, time, hobby, season, weather, hospital, post office, glasses, pencil, to wait, to teach, tired, expensive, heavy: all A.
• The four exceptions were 직업 (occupation, B), 별로 (not particularly, B), 구경하다 (to look around, B) and 미용실 (hair salon, C).

For TOPIK I, then, the A band covers almost all of what you need, and some of the B band fills the rest. If you are following the beginner study plan, A plus the first part of B is your vocabulary syllabus.

Tested on a real paper: TOPIK II

We did the same with questions 25–27 of the 102nd TOPIK II reading paper: three newspaper headlines plus their four explanation options each, 32 content words in all.

• 8 were B, for example 관광객 tourist, 효과 effect, 선수 athlete, 심각하다 serious.
• 10 were C, for example 처벌 punishment, 피해 damage, 감소하다 to decrease, 여전히 still.
• 14 were not on the list at all, including 댓글 (online comment), 메달 (medal), 종목 (event, discipline), 신기록 (new record), 방영 (broadcast) and the idiom 솜방망이 (a "cotton bat", meaning a lenient punishment).

Two lessons. First, the 2003 list was built on a 2002 corpus, so recent words like 댓글 are missing. Second, two of the 14 "missing" words were 촬영하다 and 훈련하다, whose nouns 촬영 (B) and 훈련 (C) are on the list. Learn the -하다 / -되다 family of every Sino-Korean noun, not just the noun. That doubles what the list gives you.

List 2: the standard curriculum vocabulary

NIKL's international standard curriculum for Korean (국제 통용 한국어 표준 교육과정) is the national reference standard for designing Korean courses. A 2018 article in NIKL's journal 새국어생활, by Kim Jung-sook and Lee Jung-hee, gives the vocabulary as 10,635 words: 735 at level 1, 1,100 at level 2, 1,655 at level 3, 2,200 at level 4, 2,365 at level 5 and 2,580 at level 6. Grammar is graded the same way: 336 items in all.

The vocabulary was taken from NIKL's vocabulary development projects of 2012–2015, which used three bands: beginner, intermediate and advanced. Those were then split into six levels: beginner into levels 1–2, intermediate into 3–4, advanced into 5–6. The split was checked against frequency data and the levels where textbooks first introduce each word. The result follows the six-level system that Korean courses use. TOPIK also reports six levels, though NIKL does not officially map one onto the other.

How to use it without the spreadsheet

The easiest public way to study by level is NIKL's Basic Korean Dictionary (한국어기초사전, krdict.korean.go.kr), a learners' dictionary with versions in 11 languages, English included. Its advanced search (자세히 찾기) has a filter called 등급별 어휘 (vocabulary by level) with the options 초급 (beginner), 중급 (intermediate) and 고급 (advanced). Combine it with a topic filter (주제 및 상황 범주) and you get, for example, every beginner-level word about shopping, each with its definition, pronunciation and, in the English version, a translation.

A method that works

If I were building a TOPIK vocabulary routine from these lists, I would do this:

1. Download the Excel version of the 2003 list and sort by 순위 (rank), lowest first.
2. Filter by grade. TOPIK I learners take A, then B. TOPIK II learners aiming for level 3–4 should finish B and work through C.
3. Look each word up in krdict, copy one example sentence, and note the particle it takes (창문을 열다, 회사에 다니다).
4. Add the -하다 / -되다 forms of every Sino-Korean noun as you go.
5. From level 3 upwards, add words from real texts. Take them from past-paper reading passages and news, as the TOPIK II test above shows. The level 4 jump is covered in moving from level 3 to level 4.
6. Review with spaced repetition and test yourself in context, not just word to translation.

Daily figures assume you start from the previous level and spread the new words over about 180 days.

Common mistakes with word lists

• Learning words without their particles or endings. TOPIK I question 37 in the 102nd paper was a particle gap.
• Trusting "TOPIK word lists" sold as official. We found no word list for the test on the TOPIK site; check whether a deck is based on NIKL's lists.
• Stopping at the 2003 list. It is excellent for beginners and runs out at upper intermediate.
• Ignoring homonym numbers. 가구03 and 가구04 are different words; so are many others.

Pair the vocabulary work with real papers. Where to get official past papers shows how to collect new words from them into a wrong-answer notebook.

A note on the TOPIK site: inner pages opened from a link often redirect first-time visitors to the home page. Click again, or use the menu (시험별 안내 → 토픽 PBT → 평가 기준 for the level criteria).