Sentence Word Order

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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 me

The dog bit the mailman

He ate rice

Students studied Korean

In 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 have a subject. For example, you cannot place an object after the verbs “sleep” or “die.”

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.

you will see two different words for “I,” which are:

나, used in informal sentences, and

저, used in formal sentences.

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