One of the hardest things to wrap your head around in Korean is the alien-like sentence structure. For our purposes in Lesson 1, Korean sentences are written in the following order:
Subject – Object – Verb (for example: I hamburger eat)
Or
Subject – Adjective (for example: I beautiful)
I am going to quickly explain what a "subject" and "object" mean, as your ability to understand later concepts depends on your understanding of this.
The subject refers to person/thing/noun/whatever that is acting. The subject does the action of the verb. For example, the subject in each sentence below is underlined:
I went to the park
I will go to the park
My mom loves me
He loves me
The dog ran fast
The clouds cleared up
In English, the subject always comes before the verb.
The object refers to whatever the verb is acting on. For example, the object in each sentence below is underlined
My mom loves meThe dog bit the mailman
He ate riceStudents studied KoreanIn 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 adjective-sentences 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 I'm 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 won't 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:
나, used in informal sentences, and
저, used in formal sentences.
As Lessons 1 – 5 make no distinction of formality, you will see both 나 and 저 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.
