Learn These Basic Korean Grammar Rules, Then Learn Korean

The Korean language is pretty awesome. If you're thinking about learning it, you've got good taste!

In this post, we're going to talk about some of the basic grammar points and linguistic concepts that are waiting for you if you choose to go ahead and learn Korean. We won't go super in depth, but we'll bounce around and give you a good idea of what you're getting into.

When I think about the fundamental aspects of Korean grammar,  I think about:

1. All Korean verbs (and Korean adjectives) end in ~다 (~da) by default

At their most basic, all Korean verbs end in ~다 (da). Take 하다 (hada) , for example, which means "to do". Other verbs like 먹다 (meokda, "to eat") and 가다 (kada, "to go") follow the same rule.

The thing is, you won't really see this ~다 form unless you are looking in the dictionary. Korean verbs have many forms—we'll talk about some of them down below, in the section on verb conjugations—but what virtually all of them have in common is that you remove ~다 and then replace it with something else.

Interestingly—and this may be a bit difficult to wrap your mind around at first—is that Korean adjectives function almost like verbs. If you look at a few common adjectives like 작다 (jakda, "to be small")   or 예쁘다 (yeppeuda, "to be pretty")  , you'll see that they also end in ~다. As you continue with your Korean studies, you'll also find that many of the same patterns you apply to Korean verbs can also be applied to Korean adjectives.

2. The sentence structure of Korean is "opposite" of English's (verbs come last!)

The three basic elements of a sentence are the subject, the verb, and the object.

English is what's known as an SVO language, meaning that verbs usually come in the middle of the sentence. While we have basic sentences like "he plays" or "she eats", if the sentence is even a little complex, you'll see a bunch of stuff come after the verb: "he plays in the park" or "she eats a delicious pizza."

Korean is what's known as an SOV language, meaning that, for the most part, every Korean sentence is going to end in a verb. This has quite a few implications on how the parts of Korean sentences get structured, and it'll take time to get used to.

For now, though, here's a basic sentence with a subject (the teacher), a verb (reads) and an object (a book). I'll underline the verb and bold the object so you can see how the English sentence maps to the Korean one.

3. Korean particles attach to words to show the role they play in a sentence

Grammatical particles are small but mighty labels that play a crucial role in Korean sentence structure. You can think of them as being like linguistic signposts that guide listeners and readers by indicating the role each word is playing within a sentence.

There are actually two particles used in that example sentence we looked at above:

It might help to think of Korean particles as being kind of like postpositions. In English, we havee prepositions—words like "in" or "at" that we place before locations in order to show where something takes place. Korean particles are mechanically similar, but (a) they go after the word they are related to, and (b) they can do much, much more than just indicate a location.

Here are a few more basic particles:

Particles will be a bit difficult at first because we don't really have anything like them in English and you aren't used to "tagging" every word in your sentence to show its purpose. Once you get them down, though, you'll find that the particles allow Korean Korean speakers a significant amount of flexibility in how they structure sentences. You'll appreciate them some day!

Two quick notes:

4. A lot of Korean grammar rules are actually just verb conjugations

Prepare yourself—I'm going to throw a pair of big linguistic words at you:

If you're thinking, well, actually, English verbs can change quite a bit...—check this out:

Yeah. That's a lot of forms.

(Quick note: This isn't actually as scary as it looks. Korean's patterns are very regular, so you basically only need to learn each one once and then you can use it for every verb. It's still a lot, but it's doable!)

And, furthermore, while English verbs only really conjugate (change forms) to show tense:

But Korean has verb forms for all sorts of things. For example, the below example sentences contain many different English words... but the Korean translation is simply one of the forms of 가다 (kada, "to go"). In other words, Korean can often convey in one word what English needs several to do.

5. Korean pronouns (I, you, etc) often get dropped

Re-emphasizing that the Korean word for "to go" is 가다 (kada), let's take a closer look at those three example sentences. Your job now is to find the word "I" in the Korean sentences.

As a hint, Korean has two main words that mean "I": 나 (na) is more casual, and 저 (cheo) is more polite. With this in mind, take another look at those Korean examples.

Can't find them?

Exactly.

This is a bit more advanced, but Koreans make a habit of omitting things from a sentence if they are made obvious by context. You don't usually need to use the word "I", and I'm not even going to tell you how to say "you" in Korean because you won't really see it: it's kind of rude to use.

6. In Korean, politeness is kind of like a verb tense

... speaking of rudeness, politeness is a much bigger deal in Korean than it is in English. It's not just your tone of voice or the inclusion of words like "please", either—in Korean, verbs end in different ways to show different levels of formality and politeness:

The above table shows the four main speech levels of Korean:

What's more, you can add the honorific particle 시 (si) to many of these verb forms to make them... erm... honorific (which is kind of like another level of polite).

We could write an entire blog post on how politeness, formality, and honorifics works in Korean. For now, just know that politeness is as mandatory in Korean as past tense is in English: with every single sentence that comes out of your mouth, you must indicate the relation between you and the person you're talking to by using an appropriate speech level

It's a bit scary, and it'll be new to you as an English speaker, but you'll gradually develop a feel for Korean's various speech levels as you spend more time interacting with the language and its media.

7. Numbers in Korean work a bit differently than numbers in English

I'm going to be honest—Korean numbers are hard. That's partially because Korean actually has two sets of numbers:

Making things more difficult is the fact that the numbers by themselves aren't super useful. To count things, you need to use what are called counters. Thankfully, we have counters in English, so this won't be super foreign to you:

The basic formula for counting things in Korean is noun + number + counter:

If you were looking closely, you might have noticed that I slipped one more complication in there on you:

Yeah.

You use native-Korean numbers to count some things, and Sino-Korean numbers to count other things. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why one set of numbers is used over the other, so far as I can tell, so you'll unfortunately just have to remember which is which as you go.

8. Consuming basic Korean sentences will help you to learn vocabulary and grammar points

I'm not going to lie and tell you that Korean is easy to learn. This will be a lifetime endeavor for most people, and even the most serious learners aren't getting fluent in Korean in 90 days—no matter what anyone tells you.

What I can tell you is that language learning is pretty simple. When you boil it down:

And that's why we teach Korean like this in our Korean Academy course:

We teach ~300 basic Korean grammar topics and ~1,200 super common Korean words by guiding you through a series of basic sentences that get more complex as you go: each "next" sentence has exactly one piece of information that will be new to you. This makes the learning curve super smooth. You'll always be learning something new, from the present tense to the levels of politeness, but you'll never be overwhelmed.

Oh, and these aren't just any 1,200 words, either.

You see, some words are used much more commonly than others: the word "and" appears in basically every other sentence, but you'll only see the word "carburetor" when you're talking about... well, carburetors. And how often do you do that? The 1,200 words we teach you are the ones that occur most commonly in Korean media—in fact, once you've learned them, you'll be able to figure out 80% of the sentences you encounter on places like Netflix or Viki.

It's kinda beautiful—and it's totally free for 10 days.

Try Migaku for free

9. You can actually make Korean adverbs

Adverbs are words which can modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs:

Then, you know how you can turn English adjectives into adverbs by adding -ly (be quiet → talk quietly)?

There's a similar trick for Korean adjectives and verbs—you just change -다 or -하다 to 게, -이, -히, or 으로. It's a bit trickier than English because some words take some endings but not others... but once you get a feel for how this works, you'll be able to generate tons of adverbs basically on the fly.

10. Korean nouns are thankfully super simple

We got into some pretty complex stuff, so I saved the easiest one for last: Korean nouns are pretty easy to use. They don't conjugate like verbs and adjectives, and they don't even have separate singular/plural forms you need to memorize like English nouns do. You just learn the noun and you're good to use it however you need to use it.

There are only two things you really need to worry about with nouns:

Wrapping up

We could write an entire blog post on pretty much each of these points—but, for the most part, this is a rough idea of what you'll be getting into with Korean. In my opinion, the most important three points are that:

Good luck—and remember: the more time you spend immersing in Korean content, the more you'll enjoy the Korean learning journey; the more fun you have, and the more time you put into this, the faster you'll improve. Grammar is important, but your studies should complement the things you're doing to directly engage with Korean—not be the only thing you're doing.

Good luck!