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Nouns:
= Korea
= house
= city
= car
= name
= person
= I, me (formal)
= book
= I, me (informal)
= computer
= man
= tree/wood
= woman
= sofa
= this
= China
= that
= Japan
= that (when something is far away)
= door
= thing
= doctor
= this thing
= student
= that thing
Adverbs and Other Words:
= that thing
= to be
= chair
= not
= table
= yes
= teacher
= no
= bed
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 won't learn until Lesson 5 and Lesson 6. I
will show you a list of the more commonly used forms, but I can't stress enough that you
won't understand how this works until later lessons:
HowtoStudyKorean.com Unit 1
HowtoStudyKorean.com Unit 1
In English, the object always comes after the verb. However, a sentence with a verb does
not require an object. For example:
I slept
I ate
He died
Sometimes there is no object because it has simply been omitted from the sentence. For
example, I ate or I ate rice are both correct sentences. Other verbs, by their nature,
cannot act on an object. For example, you cannot place an object after the verbs sleep
or die:
I sleep you
I die you
Subjects are also present in sentences with adjectives. However, there is no object in a
sentence with an adjective. The subjects are underlined in the following adjectivesentences below:
School is boring
I am boring
The movie was funny
The building is big
My girlfriend is pretty
The food is delicious
It is incredibly important that you understand this from the very beginning. Every Korean
sentence MUST end in either a verb (like eat, sleep or walk) or an adjective (like
beautiful, pretty, and delicious). This rule is so important that Im going to say it again:
Every Korean sentence MUST end in either a verb or adjective.
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. Don't 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.
HowtoStudyKorean.com Unit 1
HowtoStudyKorean.com Unit 1
HowtoStudyKorean.com Unit 1
(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."
HowtoStudyKorean.com Unit 1
To be:
Now it is time to learn how to make actual sentences in Korean using to be. English
speakers dont realize how difficult this word actually is in English. For example:
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 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, there will not be an object:
I am pretty
I am hungry
I am beautiful
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
+ +
HowtoStudyKorean.com Unit 1
is 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 ).
Other examples of in use:
= I am a woman
( / )
= I am a teacher
( / )
______ = I am a _______
( _______ / _____)
You can substitute any word into the blank space to make these sentences.
HowtoStudyKorean.com Unit 1
= This table
= That table
= That table
Again, although the English translations of and are the same, it is important
to remember that they do not have the same meaning in Korean.
One of the most common words in Korean is meaning thing. When , or
are placed before , the result is a compound word. Therefore, when placing
after , or , there should not be a space between the two. In other words, the
following are words in and within themselves, and not two separate words:
= this thing
= that thing
= that thing
We see this same phenomenon happen with other common words that you learn in future
lessons. You dont need to worry about this now, but we see this same thing happen with
the word (meaning place) and (meaning time).
With these words, the word thing isnt necessary in the English translation. Let me
explain.
Ill use that as an example, but the same idea can be applied to the word this.
That can be placed before a noun to describe it. As we saw earlier:
That person
That man
That woman
However, it can also be a noun itself. For example:
I like that
In this type of English sentence, that is referring to some thing that you like. It is a
noun. It is a thing.
Therefore, the sentence could just as easily be said as:
I like that thing
HowtoStudyKorean.com Unit 1
10
I dont like to use grammatical jargon in my lessons, but if you know what these words
mean, it could be helpful. In both English and Korean, that can be a determiner (as in,
I like that man), and it can also be a pronoun (as in I like that). When used as a
determiner in Korean, you should place before a noun. When used as a pronoun in
Korean, the word is used.
In this same respect, while , and translate to this, that and that respectively,
and are placed before nouns to indicate this noun, that noun and that noun, ,
and are nouns (they are pronouns). Therefore, they do not need to be followed by
the redundant word thing, although their meanings would be exactly the same:
I like this
I like this thing
I like that
I like that thing
We can now use these nouns as subjects or objects in a sentence. We will look at how
they can be used with next.
HowtoStudyKorean.com Unit 1
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