Three cards, not ten
Walk into a tarot cafe in Seoul and you will almost always be dealt three cards, not a Celtic Cross. The three stand for what has passed, what you are standing in, and what is coming — in that order, left to right. The reason is practical rather than mystical: a three-card spread can be read aloud in the ten minutes a cafe session runs, and a ten-card spread cannot. What the shorter spread gives up in nuance it gains in something more useful, which is that the person across the table can actually follow the reasoning.
It also changes what gets asked. A long spread invites the question “what will happen to me,” and a three-card spread invites “what am I in the middle of.” Korean readers lean into the second. The middle card usually gets the most time, because it is the only one you can still do anything about.
A reversed card is not a bad card
When a card lands upside down, the common English shorthand is that it means the opposite. That is not how it is usually taken here. A reversal is read as the same force pointed inward, or held back, or arriving before you are ready for it. The Tower upright is the roof coming off; the Tower reversed is the crack you have been not looking at. Neither is good news, exactly, but they are not opposites either.
This matters because the cards with frightening pictures — Death, the Tower, the Devil — are the ones people most want flipped into something softer. They do not soften. What changes is the direction the force is running, and a reader who tells you Death reversed means “nothing ends” is telling you what you want rather than what the card says.
Drawing again does not give you a better answer
You can shuffle and draw as many times as you like, and each spread will be different. That is the nature of it, and it is also the reason a second draw on the same question is not worth much. The first spread answers the question you actually brought. The second answers a question you have already rewritten in your head to get a better result.
The pages on this site are written on the same assumption. The meanings are set down in advance and looked up, not generated fresh each time, so the same card in the same position says the same thing today as it did last month. If a reading changes every time you refresh it, what you are reading is the refresh, not the card.
Where tarot sits next to saju
Saju works from a fixed thing — the moment you were born — and therefore says the same about you at forty as it did at twenty. Tarot works from a shuffle, and says something about the week you are in. Koreans who use both tend to keep that division: saju for “what kind of person am I,” tarot for “what is going on right now.” Asking tarot who you are, or saju what happens on Thursday, gets you a worse answer from both.
Reading the cards on this site
The card-by-card pages are written in Korean so far — seventy-eight cards, each with the upright and reversed reading and what the card means in each of the three positions. The card names are given in English on those pages, so they are usable with a translator if you want the detail.