Professional Documents
Culture Documents
= Korea
Common Usages:
= Korean person
= Korean language
= Korean person
Examples
7 = I lived in Korea for seven years
= I will go to Korea next year
= My mom will come to Korea this year
= I learned Korean in Korea
= High school is difficult in Korea
= that house was built in Korea
= I live in Korea
= city
= name
=I
=I
= man
= woman
= that
= this
= that (when something is far away)
= thing
= chair
= table
= teacher
= bed
= house
= car
= person
= book
= computer
= tree/wood
= sofa
= China
= Japan
= door
= doctor
= student
Adverbs and Other words:
= to be
= not
= yes
When speaking on the phone, Korean people often say this many times and pronounce it as
Example
, = Yes, I want to go
= no
Greeting Words
When learning a language, people always want to learn hello, how are you, and thank you before anything else. I know that. However, at this stage
you only know words and have no knowledge or experience in how to use or conjugate these words. The grammar within these words is too complex for you to
understand right now. However, you can just memorize these words as one unit and not worry about the grammar within them at this point.
= hello
and are the two words that are commonly used to say thank you. However, they are rarely used in those forms and are almost always
conjugated. They can be conjugated in a variety of ways, which you wont learn until Lesson 5 and Lesson 6. I will show you a list of the more commonly used
forms, but I cant stress enough that you wont understand how this works until later lessons:
It is also important to point out here that there are two ways to say I or me in Korean. Depending on how polite you need to be speaking, many things within a
sentence (mostly the conjugation) can change. You wont learn about the different honorific conjugations until Lesson 6, so you do not need to worry about
understanding those until then. However, before you reach those lessons, you will see two different words for I, which are:
, used in informal sentences, and
, used in formal sentences.
As Lessons 1 5 make no distinction of formality, you will see both and arbitrarily used. Dont worry about why one is used over the other until Lesson 6,
when politeness will be explained.
Okay, now that you know all of that, we can talk about making Korean sentences.
.
I am sure that you will be tempted to start substituting Korean words into those constructions to make real Korean sentences. However, at this point, that is too
complicated. The goal of this lesson is to familiarize yourself with thestructure of Korean sentences.
The same could be done for sentences with adjectives. However, remember that sentences with adjectives will not have an object:
1) My girlfriend is pretty: My girlfriend is pretty
: is attached to my girlfriend (the subject)
2) The movie was scary = The movie was scary
: is attached to the movie (the subject)
There is one more particle that you should be aware of before we go any further.
(Place or time)
We havent talked about places or times yet, but if you do an action at a time, you must attach the particle to the word indicating the time.
is also attached to a word to indicate that it is a place in the sentence. I want to write more about what does, but at this point, it would only confuse you.
For now, it is sufficient to know that is used to indicate a place in a sentence.
Again, it is hard to translate these particles into English, but, plays the role of the underlined words in the following sentences:
1) I went at 3pm
2) I went to the park
Sentences with a place/time can also have an object in them. For example:
3) I ate hamburgers at 3pm
If I were to write those same sentence using Korean structure and particles, they would look like this:
1) I 3pm went
2) I park went
3) I hamburgers 3pm ate
In these cases, at 3pm or to the park act as adverbs (a word that tells you when, where, how, how much). There is no set place for an adverb within a sentence,
and it can generally be placed anywhere (except the end). Adverbs will be discussed at length in Lesson 8.
Again, the purpose of this first part of Lesson 1 was to familiarize yourself with the different Korean particles and sentence structure. This knowledge will act as
your base for upcoming lessons when you will apply yourself to make actual sentences with verbs/adjectives in Korean. While you will have to wait a little bit to
create those types of sentences, we can now talk about creating actual Korean sentences with the word to be.
To be:
Now its time to learn how to make an actual sentence using the word to be. English speakers often dont realize how difficult this word is in English. Look at the
following examples:
I am a man
He is a man
They are men
I was a man
They were men
In each of those sentences, the word to be is represented by a different word (is/am/are/was/were) depending on the subject and tense of the sentence. Luckily, in
Korean, the same word is used to represent is, am, are, was and were. This word is
should not be thought of as a verb or an adjective in Korean, as in most cases it acts differently. I will teach you how differs from verbs and adjectives as
it becomes important (in future lessons).
Sometimes however, is somewhat similar to adjectives. Remember that sentences ending with adjectives do not have objects in them. Whenever a sentence
is predicated by an adjective, there will be no object in the sentence. Only sentences with verbs have objects. Lets look at some examples:
I eat hamburgers (eat is a verb, the object is a hamburger)
I meet my friend (meet is a verb, the object is my friend)
I study Korean (study is a verb, the object is Korean)
I listen to music (listen is a verb, the object is music)
All of those sentences (can) have objects because the verb is the predicate of the sentence. However, in sentences that are predicated by adjectives:
I am pretty
I am beautiful
I am hungry
I am smart
This means that we can never use the particle ~/ in a sentence predicated by an adjective (because ~/ denotes that there is an object). The object particle
is also not used when using the word . The basic structure for a sentence predicated by is:
[noun /] [another noun] []
For example:
I man = I am a man
Now substitute the words for man and I:
=I
= man
+ +
gets attached directly to the noun. So, the above construction looks like:
= I am a man
It is very important that you remember that ~/ is not attached to words in sentences with . The following would be very incorrect:
.
is the only word that acts like this, and is one of the reasons why you should treat it differently than other verbs or adjectives.
The focus of this lesson (and Lessons 2 and 3) is to introduce you to simple Korean sentence structure. Until you reach Lesson 5 and Lesson 6 you will not be
exposed to the conjugations and honorifics of Korean verbs, adjectives and .
In reality, these words are never (or very very rarely) used without these conjugations and honorifics. Therefore, while I stress the importance of understanding
the structure of the sentences presented in this Lessons 1, 2, 3 and 4 do not use the sentences in any form of communication with Korean people, as they will most
likely not be understood. In order to completely understand what is presented in Lessons 5 and 6 (and for the rest of your Korean studies), it is essential that you
understand what is presented in these first four lessons even though they may be seen as technically incorrect.
For all of the technically incorrect (un-conjugated) sentences presented in Lesson 1 4 I will provide a correct (conjugated) version of the same sentence in
parenthesis below the un-conjugated version (one formal and one informal conjugation). Note one more time that you will not understand these conjugations
until Lessons 5 and 6(for verbs and adjectives) and Lesson 9 (for ).
______ = I am a _______
( _______ / _____)
You can substitute any noun into the blank space to make these sentences.