LEARN KOREAN (한국어) [GRAMMAR] #1

CONJUGATING WITH HONORIFICS

You learned how to conjugate verbs and adjectives into the past, present and future forms. You also learned that those conjugations are hardly ever used in speech and are most often used when writing a book, test, article or diary. Now, you will learn the basic word conjugations that are more commonly used in speech.

What are Honorifics in Korean?

In Korean, depending on who you are speaking to, you must use different conjugations of the same word. The different conjugations imply respect and politeness to the person you are speaking to. Depending on that person's age and/or seniority in relation to yours, you must speak differently to that person.

Never, never underestimate the importance of honorific endings in Korean.

Keep in mind that all these conjugations with different honorific endings have exactly the same meaning. You will learn how to conjugate using honorifics in the following ways:

1. Informal Low Respect
~>Used when talking to your friends, people you are close with, people younger than you and your family.
2. Informal High Respect
~>This can be used in most situations, even in formal situations despite the name being "informal." This is usually the way most people speak when they are trying to show respect to the person they are talking to.
3. Formal High Respect
~>This is a very high respect form that is used when addressing people who deserve a lot of respect from you. It is hard to describe perfectly, but honestly, the difference between 'Informal High Respect' and 'Formal High Respect' is not very big. As long as you speak in either of these two ways, you will not offend anyone.

Remember the rule you learned: When adding something to a word stem, if the last vowel in the stem is ㅏ or ㅗ, you must add 아 plus whatever you are adding. If the last vowel is anything other than ㅏ or ㅗ, you must add 어 plus whatever you are adding. If the last syllable of the stem is 하, you add 하여 which can be shortened to 해.

Also, you learned that if a stem of a word ends in a vowel, 았/었다 gets merged to the actual stem itself when conjugating into the past tense.

When adding 아/어 to the stem of a word, the same rule applies. That is, if 아/어 gets added to a stem that ends in a vowel, 아/어 will be merged to the stem itself. Conversely, if a stem ends in a consonant, 아/어 is attached to the stem, but not merged to it.