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📎LESSON FOURTEEN (KOREAN GRAMMAR FOR BEGINNERS)

Korean Grammar for Beginners

basics of Korean grammar!

Contents

1 Is Korean grammar difficult?

1.1 How are Korean sentences structured?

2 Basic Korean Verbs

2.1 Conjugation - 이다 (ida)

2.2 Conjugation - 있다 (itda)

2.3 Conjugation - 없다 (eopda)

3 Korean Verb Tenses

4 Korean Negative Verb Form

.

Is Korean grammar difficult?

It wouldn't be accurate to say that Korean grammar is difficult or easy. Like many Asian languages, the grammar is quite different from English. But like the grammar of any language, Korean grammar follows rules and sentence structure that makes sense. You just need to get used to the primary quirk of its grammar. You may know that English basic grammar follows the structure:

SUBJECT (S) + VERB (V) + OBJECT (O)

For example, I (subject) study (verb) Korean (object). Most languages have a SVO grammar structure like this. The action leads the object so you know what is happening before you know what it's happening to.

How are Korean sentences structured?

Basic Korean grammar, on the other hand, uses the order:

SUBJECT (S) + OBJECT (O) + VERB (V).

For native speakers of languages that use the SVO grammar structure, such as English, this may sound confusing and incorrect.

Korean, Japanese, and to some extent German, all use SOV in their grammar.You'll understand why this kind of grammar makes sense when forming a Korean sentence later in the lesson. For now, here are some examples of the sentence structure of Korean to help you get acquainted with the grammar:

나는 오렌지를 먹었어요 (naneun orenjireul meogeosseoyo) = I + orange + ate = I ate an orange

오빠가 축구를 해요 (oppaga chukgureul haeyo) = Big brother + football + to do = My big brother plays football

나는 친구를 만나요 (naneun chingureul mannayo) = I + friend + to meet = I meet my friend

To understand why the Korean language uses grammar like this, you need to understand a bit about Korean verbs and how they work.

Basic Korean Verbs

In Korean grammar, the verb needs to be conjugated based on the context. This means that Korean verbs follow certain grammar rules that control how they're spelled.

You'll conjugate the word depending on its tense, level of politeness and whether the connecting vocabulary ends in a vowel or consonant. However, the form does not change depending on the subject! So you don't have to worry about the Korean particle changing (a topic for another article). Let's dive a bit further on this grammar point with some examples of conjugation.

Conjugation - 이다 (ida)

Here are conjugation examples for the verb 이다 (ida) - to be: