You finished this day
Ordering food
Today is the restaurant: getting a menu, ordering a dish and saying how many, asking for water without sounding abrupt, and leaving with the bill paid or the food boxed up. Almost all of it runs on one word, 주세요 (juseyo), which you met on day 6. By the end you can get through a whole meal out.
Asking for the menu and a dish
Everything you order is a noun followed by 주세요:
Korean names the thing first and counts it second, so the order is 'bibimbap one, please', not 'one bibimbap, please'. English does the same on an invoice or a shopping list ('apples, 3'), and that is the right picture to keep in mind: item, then quantity. 주세요 comes from 주다, 'to give', in a polite request form, so the whole sentence is literally 'bibimbap one, give'. There is no word for 'me' because it is obvious who wants the food.
Softening with 좀
좀 goes just before 주세요 and takes the edge off a request:
좀 is a shortening of 조금, 'a little'. Put into a request, it makes the thing you want sound smaller, which is exactly what English does with 'just' or 'a bit': 'could I just have some water'. It has become so automatic that it softens requests where the amount makes no sense, such as 좀 천천히 말해 주세요, day 6's 'please speak slowly' with a little cushioning added. A bare 주세요 is not rude, but a string of them sounds like a list of orders, so when in doubt, add 좀.
Takeaway and the bill
The last things you say before you leave:
Here 주세요 follows a verb instead of a noun. 포장해 and 계산해 are forms of 포장하다 'to wrap' and 계산하다 'to calculate', and adding 주세요 turns 'please give me it' into 'please do this for me'. It is the same pattern as 천천히 말해 주세요 on day 6. So 주세요 has two jobs: after a thing, 'give me'; after an action, 'do it for me'. You will learn to build those verb forms yourself on day 26, so for now take these as whole phrases.
Carry over, from earlier days
📋 Today’s words 12
Check yourself
8 questions. Get 5 right to finish the day.