Korean Verbs Deep Dive (+list of verbs at bottom of page)

Good news:

By the time you finish this article, you're going to understand how Korean verbs work. From super basic stuff like what a verb is (we don't judge) to more difficult stuff like conjugation rules or the various forms of verbs—it's all here.

We've also included a big table of the 25 most useful Korean verbs for beginners. You can screenshot it and make it your phone's background... or something.

Anyway, get ready for:

The über important job that verbs do

There's one thing that's worth making clear before we dive into this:

As much Korean grammar as you might learn, it's basically doing the same thing: providing you a bit more information about the verb of the sentence it's used in. Grammar helps us specify things like:

Suffice it to say that if you want to speak Korean, or any language, getting a handle on verbs is super important.

A crash course in Korean sentence structure

We won't go super far into this because we've got an entire separate blog post about basic Korean grammar, but, really fast, a sentence's fundamental building blocks consist of three things: subject, verb, and object.

I refer to these as being "fundamental" building blocks because languages are actually categorized according to how they organize these things within a sentence.

While longer sentences get complicated, you can immediately see what this means for Korean word order if we look at a simple sentence. I've underlined the verbs in the below sentences (and bolded the objects) so you can see how English and Korean organize their sentences differently.

The 4 categories of Korean verbs

So, I'm pretty sure you know what a verb is. You've seen Nike ads before. It's what you do.

What might be news to you is that, just as there are proper nouns (like Korea or Rap Monster) and common nouns (like kimchi or hangover stew), there are actually different types of verbs, too.

Korean recognizes four different categories of verbs, and roughly understanding what each one does will make your language learning life easier.

1️⃣ Action verbs (AKA "processive verbs")

Let's start with the easy one: action verbs are the concrete things you do. These verbs describe physical actions and activities that you can actually (usually) observe someone doing. Action verbs are probably what you think of when you think of verbs.

Some common ones include:

2️⃣ Descriptive verbs (AKA "stative verbs" or "adjectives")

Whereas action verbs state what the subject of a sentence does, descriptive verbs state what the subject of a sentence is. Specifically, they say that the subject of the sentence is a quality, state, or condition... which is to say that they describe the subject.

While they're not quite the same thing, you won't run into any problems if you simplify things by saying that descriptive verbs are just adjectives.

Some common Korean "adjectives" include:

3️⃣ Existential verbs

Existential verbs, as the name implies, indicate the existence of something. Thankfully, there are only two of them:

These verbs are used to say that somethings exists (there is...), but they're also used to say that something is at a certain location or that you have something.

Using "there is" to show possession might be a bit difficult to wrap your head around, so don't over think it. Just remember that if you say you have something in English, you'll say that it exists in Korean:

4️⃣ Copulative verbs

"Copula" is a fancy linguistic word that you can basically think of as being an equal sign: it says that A is B. The most common English copula is "to be".

Korean has two copulas:

💰 A bonus unofficial one

There are also special "helper" verbs, the most common of which is 하다 (hada), that you can combine with a noun to create a verb. These verbs technically fall into the category of either action verbs or descriptive verbs, but I've included them in a separate section because I think the pattern is worth highlighting.

The basics of Korean verb conjugation

Good news and bad news here folks:

It'll take a bit of effort and memorization on your part to master Korean conjugation, and we don't have enough space in this blog post to cover it in detail, but here's the basics you need to know to get started:

1️⃣ Take a Korean verb in dictionary form

If you go back to the above section and skim through the example verbs I gave you, you'll notice that they all end in -다 (da). The dictionary form of all Korean verbs ends in -다 (da).

If we break down the verb 만나다 (mannada, "to meet"), for example, we get this:

2️⃣ Remove ~다 to get the verb stem

The verb stem is the base part of the verb, and it generally remains consistent no matter what kind of funny business is going on with the end of the verb.

Thankfully, you don't need to be a green thumb to handle Korean verb stems. All you have to do is take a verb and yoink ~다 from the end of it, as follows:

If you know your Hangul, you'll notice that the stem 가 (ka) ends in a vowel whereas the stem 먹 (mog) ends with a consonant. This is very important. Most Korean verb endings (and particles, and grammar points in general) come in two shapes: one that gets used with syllable blocks that end in a consonant and another that gets used with syllable blocks that in a vowel.

3️⃣ Add your verb ending or conjugation pattern

Verb stems, like flower stems, are incomplete. You need to tack the petals on top before people can appreciate their nature as a flower or verb.

We'll give more concrete details about how verbs change down below, in the section on Korean verb tenses. For now, just know that:

‼️ A note about Korean's irregular verbs

Korean verbs are super regular, especially in comparison to their English counterparts. Nevertheless, there are seven types of Korean irregular verbs you'll need to keep an eye on:

Let's look at two -ㅂ irregular verbs to show what we mean by "verb stem ends in...":

How irregular verbs work is beyond the scope of this blog post (read about them here, if you're interested), but you should know two things:

The basics of Korean verb tenses

With this in mind, now look at the below table and see if you can work out any patterns:

하다 is an irregular verb, but if we omit that and focus on 먹다/하다, we can see that:

It unfortunately gets more complex than that:

It's beyond the scope of this blog post, but if you want to see all of Korean's possible verb forms, check out the Wiktionary pages for 가다, 먹다, and 하다. (Click on "Show ▼" at the far-right side of the grey "Conjugation" bar).

The basics of Korean speech levels (banmal vs honorifics)

In the above section we commented that verbs in the Korean language conjugate in order to communicate information that we wouldn't think of as being the "job" of the verb in English.

One of the things Korean verbs do that English verbs don't do is specify the status of the speaker in relation to the person they are talking to and/or about. This is done by using specific verb endings:

Basically, when conjugating the main verb of your sentence, you need to decide between:

You can read a bit more about Korean speech levels in our blog post on basic Korean grammar.

Alternatively, if you dare.........

When in doubt, go with the -요 ending (polite, informal). It's one of the most commonly used speech levels and will pretty much always be OK, unless your'e talking with a super important person or are in an obviously formal setting.

Some common Korean verbs

If you want to learn Korean, you're going to have to memorize many verbs. Hundreds, if not thousands. That'll take awhile. For now, though, here are 25 common verbs for you to start with:

A beginner-friendly approach to learning Korean 

Hey, friend.

This stuff is complicated, and if it feels like I'm moving quickly or skipping over stuff—it's because I am.

You see, Korean demands a lot out of its verbs. They do a lot of things and change in a lot of ways. There's just no way I can cover everything about verbs, verb conjugations, honorifics, and all of that in a format that you'll be able to make sense of while skimming.

Wanna know how I know that?

We made a Korean course, and it took us like seven lessons just to cover how verbs conjugate in the present tense. And that was just the regular ones, using the informal/non-polite form. (Irregular verbs and polite/formal stuff comes later).

Like, check this out.

Yeah. That's a lot of detail. It's nicely paced, though. Our lessons are broken down and spread out so that they're easy to follow. You're always learning something, but never overwhelmed.

The best part is that you don't have to memorize anything.

We condense everything we expect you to remember into nice-looking flashcards, and leverage a spaced-repetition algorithm tracks your performance in order to build a personalized review schedule for you. All you have to do is want it—be consistent and keep at the course—and Migaku Memory will handle the rest.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by Korean verbs, or have been at this for awhile but don't feel like you're getting anywhere, give Migaku's Korean Academy a shot.

It's totally free for ten days, and that's enough time to get through the initial lessons explaining how verbs work. Your language learning life is either going to be changed... or it won't be, but at least you'll finally understand how Korean verbs work.

Try Migaku for free

That's everything you need to know about verbs in Korean, but...

This article was pretty technical, so I wanted to remind you not to get too hung up on the rules.

Here's a golden lesson about language learning:

Verbs are complex... but as you spend more time with Korean, they'll begin to make sense. You'll just hear, say, informal-polite past tense verbs often enough that you'll kind of remember the sound (~써). Then, the next time you skim a grammatical resource of some sort, it'll click. All the foundation your immersion has given you will support you and make learning easier.

So, good on you for learning about verbs!

But remember to have fun, too 💜