Bonus Lesson: A simple Korean sentenceOkay, now that we've learned a whole of bunch of words and phrases, you're probably curious to learn how to put them together into an actual proper sentence. Ready for that? Let's take the plunge into some basic Korean grammar.
First off, Korean sentence structure is a bit different than English. Simple English sentences generally use a basic
Subject-Verb-Object format like this:
I like cats. Korean, however, usually uses a
Subject-Object-Verb format, which in English would look like this:
I cats like.Strange huh? In Korean, our example sentence would looks like this:
저는 고양이를 좋아해요.Jeo-neun goyongi-reul joahaeyo. Okay, before you say, "
Aigoo!" it's not that bad as all that; the sentence breaks down like this:
Jeo (저) = I (the topic of the sentence)
neun (는) = (topic particle - this marker indicates the topic of the sentence)
goyangi (고양이) = cat (the object of the sentence)
reul (를) = (object particle - this marker indicates the object of the sentence)
joahaeyo (좋아해요) = like (the verb - conjugated present tense in the informal, polite form)
While in an English sentence, the word order is critical to tell what is the subject and what is the object and so forth, in Korean, word order is less important. Instead, they identify what's what through the use of little grammatical bits or markers called
classification particles.
I’m going to try to keep things as simple as possible, but the truth is, the use of
classification particles is one of the most difficult concepts to deal with in learning Korean. You really can get lost in the grammatical weeds pretty quickly. There are something like 26 distinct classification particles, used in 32 different functions, and most have 2 forms, depending on the whether the word ends in a vowel or consonant!
As I said, I'm going to try to keep in simple, so here is all you need to know right now. The basic rule of proper Korean grammar is
nouns never stand alone. They will always have a particle. Note: You may hear Koreans drop some use of particles when speaking the informal, casual
banmal (반말), but that's not really proper grammar. Even the very word,
banmal , literally means "half words".
Topic particles come in two flavors, depending on whether the subject ends in a vowel or a consonant.
For a topic word ending in a vowel, you use
neun (는)
For a topic word ending in a consonant, you use
eun (은)
Object particles also come in two flavors, depending on whether the object noun ends in a vowel or a consonant.
For an object word ending in vowel, you use
reul (를)
For an object word ending in a consonant, you use
eul (을)
One last thing you may have noticed. In the Korean example sentence I presented, it said "cat" not "cats". In Korean, as in most Asian languages, nouns by default have a "general number" unless specified, so using plurals is not necessary. It's kind of like our use of the English word "fish". It is a generic term that can mean a single fish or fish in general. Most Korean nouns are like this. They will only use plurals when it seems necessary to emphasize that something is plural. Most of the time, they just use the general form. However, if you ever need to make a noun plural in Korean, it is very easy to do. Just add the
plural particle deul (들) to the end of the word like this:
cats =
goyangi-deul (고양이들)
Note:
deul (들) is rarely used with nouns for inanimate objects. It is more often used with nouns denoting animate objects (people and animals), and then only when really necessary to make the distinction.
Whew! Well, there you have it! It's a whole lot to take in, I know, but now you know how to make a simple sentence in Korean!