KOREAN LANGUAGE TUTORIAL

LESSON 60

Korean Lesson: Lessons 60

Introduction
In this lesson, you will learn how to say “I make” or “I let” somebody to do something. Just like with a lot of other Korean grammatical principles, this one doesn’t make sense at first to English speakers, simply because the construction is so different from English grammar. As always, I will break it down for you step by step. Lets get started.

To make/To let…: ~게 하다

Before we begin, note that “make” has many meanings in English. In this lesson, we are not talking about the definition of “make” as in “to make a cake” (만들다). Instead, we are talking about the definition of the word “make” in the following sentence:
I make my mom happy
Note here that this definition of “make” has nothing to do with actually making an object. Rather, it is about influencing/telling somebody what to do. More examples of this definition in English:
I made him study
I want to make my friend go
I will make him sleep
It sounds weird, but the grammatical principle used to say “make” (in this definition) is also used to mean “to let” in English. For example:
I let him study
I want to let my friend go
I will let him sleep
If I were to write those three sentences down in Korean, they would appear identical to the three sentences I presented earlier. This is confusing at first, but the context always makes it clear which one you are trying to mean.
Now that you know all of that, lets look at how we can construct this grammatical principle. In Korean, there is no actual word for “make” or “let” in this definition. Instead, you must add ~게 하다 to the verb that you are making/letting somebody do. The object particle 을/를 gets attaches to the person that you are making/letting. For example:
저는 그를 공부하게 한다 = I make/let him study
저는 저의 친구를 가게 하고 싶다 = I want to make/let my friend go
저는 그를 자게 할 것이다 = I will make/let him sleep
This grammatical form can be attached to both verbs and adjectives. When attached to an adjective, it has the meaning of “to make somebody (adjective).” More examples:
저는 저의 여자 친구를 행복하게 했어요 = I made my girlfriend happy
엄마가 나에게 선물을 주셔서 저를 놀라게 했어요 = Because my mother gave me a present, she surprised me
If you want to say that you surprised somebody, you can use this grammatical form. The word for “to be surprised” is 놀라다. Because this is an adjective, if you want to say that you “surprised somebody” it is the equivalent of saying “I made somebody surprised. So, we can do this:
제가 한국말을 할 수 있어서 저는 한국 사람들을 항상 놀라게 해요 = Because I can speak Korean, I always surprise Korean people
Sometimes, there might be the need for two objects in a sentence. If you were going to make somebody do something, sometimes another noun needs to be added. For example:
1 noun: I made him study
2 nouns: I made him study Korean
1 noun: I made him read
2 nouns: I made him read a book
In these situations, the subject particle 이/가 can be attached to the person you are making do something, the object particles 을/를 can be attached to the object you are making them do, and the grammatical form ~게 하다 can be attached to the verb you are making them do. Confused yet? Lets take a look:
저는 그를 공부하게 했다 = I made him study
저는 그가 한국어를 공부하게 했다 = I made him study Korean
저는 그를 읽게 했다 = I made him read
저는 그가 책을 읽게 했다 = I made him read a book
Another example:
나는 학생들이 내 말을 듣게 했어 = I made the students listen to me

~게 해주다
You learned all about the word 주다 and ~아/어 주다 in Lesson 41. After adding ~게 하다 to a verb/adjective, you could also connect 아/어 주다 to 하다. For example, instead of writing:
저는 학생들을 공부하게 한다 = I let the students study
You could write:
저는 학생들을 공부하게 해준다 = I let the students study
The meaning is the same, but because you are adding ~아/어 주다 to the end of the word, it implies that you are performing some sort of service (essentially “giving” something to them). Therefore, if you want to add 아/어 주다 after adding ~게 하다, it must only go in a sentence where somebody is being made to do something positive. For example:
저는 학생들을 행복하게 했다 = I made the students happy, could also be written as:

저는 학생들을 행복하게 해 주었다 = I made the students happy
however, this sentence:
저는 학생들을 슬프게 했다 = I made the students sad, could not be written as:
저는 학생들을 슬프게 해 줬다… this is incorrect because “making somebody sad” is not positive.