"채식주의자"
Translation:vegetarian
11 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Korean used to be written in Chinese characters before a super clever king invented hangeul. And many Korean words come from Chinese. Korean children learn basic Chinese characters at school. I personally appreciate the Chinese characters posts in the comments even though I can't understand Chinese ❤
For those who want to know more about these hanja:
菜食(채식): can be further decomposed into 菜 and 食, where 菜 means vegetable (as in야채), and 食 means food (as in 양식), so 菜食 refers to a vegetarian diet.
主義(주의): concept or doctrine, usually works as a suffix meaning "-ism"
者(자): person.
So "菜食主義者" means "a person practicing vegetarianism" or "a vegetarian."
P.S. I am a Mandarin native living in Taiwan. In Mandarin Chinese we seldom use this word but we can easily understand it.
733
I don't think there is a separate Korean word for this. Traditionally, Koreans just specify that you are a "strict vegetarian" but nowadays the English word is used: 비건
Beware though, many people don't know what that really means so it's better to specify that you don't eat fish, egg etc.