KOREAN LANGUAGE TUTORIAL

LESSON 24

Korean Lesson: Lessons  24

Conjugating with Honorifics
In previous Lesson, 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. In this lesson, you will learn the basic word conjugations that are more commonly used in speech.

What are Honorifics in Korean?
To this point, you haven’t learned anything about Honorifics. 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 seniority, you must speak differently to that person.

The reason this is so hard for English speakers to understand is that we have nothing like this in English. We can make some sentences sound polite by adding ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ but you can only use those words in a limited amount of sentences.

For example, if somebody asked you “where did you go yesterday?”

You could respond:
I went to school yesterday.
In English, regardless of whether you were speaking to your girlfriend’s grandfather or your best friend, that sentence would look and sound exactly the same.

In Korean, you must use a higher respect form when speaking to somebody older or higher in position

I started learning Korean a few months before I work to Korea. I was not studying very hard or often, so my Korean was extremely basic. When I arrived at the airport in Seoul, was driven directly to the training center and introduced to trainor. The trainor said “I am happy you are training here before you are going to youre working area,” to which I replied:
나도 (the lower respect form of saying “me too”)

Instead of being impressed that I least knew some words in Korean, the look on his face was as if somebody had just kidnapped his daughter.

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
When talking with friends, people you are close with, younger people and family.

2) Informal high respect
Used in most situations, even in formal situations despite being called “informal.” This is usually the way most people speak when they are trying to show respect.

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.
Before you start! Remember the rule you learned in Lesson 5: 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 syllable of the stem is 하, you add 하여 which can be shortened to 해.

Verbs
Present Tense
You learned in previous Lesson how to conjugate verbs to the present tense by adding ㄴ/는다 to the stem of the word. To review:

저는 먹다 = I eat (not conjugated)
저는 먹는다 = I eat (conjugated – present tense)

저는 배우다 = I learn (not conjugated)
저는 배운다 = I learn (conjugated – present tense)
There are three more conjugations in the present tense that you should be aware of.