LEARN KOREAN (한국어) [GRAMMAR] #1

SENTENCE WORD ORDER

One of the hardest things to wrap your head around in Korean is the alien-like sentence structure. Korean sentences are written in the following order:

Subject-Object-Verb (I hamburger eat)
OR
Subject-Adjective (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
My mom loves me
The dog ran fast

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 is underlined:

The dog bit the mailman
He ate rice
Students studied Korean

In English, the object always comes after the verb. However, a sentence with 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 object. For example, you cannot place an object after the verbs "to sleep" or "to go."

Subject 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
The movie was funny
My boyfriend is handsome

Verbs and adjectives are placed at the end of a sentence. Actually, every Korean sentence and clause must end in one of the following:

-A verb
-An adjective
-이다

Every verb, every adjective and 이다 end in "다," and these are the only words in Korean that can be conjugated.

Korean also has a formality system built into the language. That is, the way one speaks to an older person who deserves high respect would be different than the way one speaks to a friend. There are many ways words in a sentence can change depending on the formality of the situation, but the two most common, basic and important things to be aware of are:

1) There are two ways to say "I" or "me" in Korean:

나 - I/me (informal)
저 - I/me (formal)

2) There are many ways to conjugate a word. The word 고맙다 can be conjugated many different ways. It is important to know which conjugation to use in which situation. Until then, you will see both 나 and 저 arbitrarily used.