The whole grammar

Hangul is the quickest part of Korean to learn: an alphabet of fourteen basic consonants and ten basic vowels, put together into square blocks of one syllable each, so that 한 is h + a + n. What takes longer is reading a word aloud, because where two blocks meet their sounds change by fixed rules: 국물 (broth) is said gungmul, 같이 (together) gachi. This area takes the letters first and then the rules one by one. The spelling never changes; the romanisation under every Korean word on this site follows the rules, so it is a reliable guide to what you hear.

A Korean sentence is built towards its end. The verb — or an adjective, which in Korean behaves like a verb — comes last and carries the tense and the politeness; everything else stands in front of it, each noun tagged with a particle that says what it is doing: 저는 커피를 마셔요, “I drink coffee”, literally “I-as-for coffee-object drink”. This area covers that frame and the handful of sentence types a beginner needs first: “A is B” and “A is not B”, “there is” and “I have”, questions and question words, the words for this and that, and the things a Korean sentence simply leaves out.

English knows who did what to whom from the order of the words. Korean knows it from particles: short endings attached to a noun that say what the noun is doing — 는 for the topic, 가 for the subject, 를 for the object, 에 for a place or a time. Most of them have two shapes, one after a consonant and one after a vowel (책은 but 커피는), and choosing the right shape is as much part of the particle as its meaning. Because the particles carry the roles, the nouns before the verb can change places; only the verb stays at the end.

Korean has two complete sets of numbers: native Korean 하나, 둘, 셋 and Sino-Korean 일, 이, 삼, which came into the language with Chinese vocabulary. Which set you use is not a matter of style but of what you are counting: hours take native numbers and minutes Sino-Korean ones, so a single time such as 세 시 이십 분 uses both. Most things are counted with a counter word after the number, and the counter decides which set it takes.

A Korean verb is a stem with endings stacked on it, and the last ending does two jobs at once: it finishes the sentence, and it says how the speaker stands towards the listener. 갑니다, 가요 and 가 all mean "I go"; they differ the way a handshake differs from a wave. On top of that, -(으)시- and a small set of special words show respect for the person a sentence is about — and a second set lets the speaker step down instead.

Korean marks time inside the verb, just before the ending that says how polite the sentence is: 가요, 갔어요, 갈 거예요. There are fewer tenses than in English and more aspect: whether an action is under way (-고 있다), whether its result is still there (-아/어 있다), or whether a past state has since come to an end (-았/었었-). One past form covers what English splits into "did" and "have done", and the plain present covers "do", "am doing" and often "will do" as well.

Korean has two short negatives that stand before the verb — 안 for "not" and 못 for "cannot" — and two long ones that follow the stem, -지 않다 and -지 못하다. Requests and suggestions have a negative of their own, -지 마세요. A handful of very common verbs come with a separate negative partner: 없다 for 있다, 모르다 for 알다, 아니다 for the copula — nobody says 안 있어요 for "there isn't". And where English uses "never", "nobody" or "nothing", Korean adds a word such as 아무도 and keeps the negative on the verb.

A Korean verb is irregular in one place only: the last sound of its stem, where the ending is joined on. 듣다 becomes 들어요, 춥다 becomes 추워요, 모르다 becomes 몰라요 — and in each case the change follows a pattern shared by a whole group of verbs. There are seven such groups, and the difficulty is less the patterns themselves than knowing which verbs follow them, because a regular verb such as 받다 can look exactly like an irregular one such as 듣다.

English puts "want", "can", "must" and "try" in front of the verb. Korean puts them after it: the main verb takes a linking ending and a second verb or a fixed pattern follows — 먹고 싶어요, 먹을 수 있어요, 먹어야 해요, 먹어 보세요. The first verb never changes for tense or politeness; the last one carries all of it. Many of these second verbs are ordinary verbs with a new job — 보다 "see" becomes "try", 주다 "give" becomes "do as a favour", 버리다 "throw away" becomes "do completely" — and knowing the old meaning is the quickest way to feel the new one.

English builds a passive with "be" and a participle, and a causative with "make" or "let". Korean has a short way and a long way for both. The short way is a syllable inside the verb: 보다 "see" becomes 보이다 "be seen", 먹다 "eat" becomes 먹이다 "feed". It exists only for a fixed set of verbs and has to be learnt word by word. The long way works for almost any verb: -아/어지다 or 되다 for the passive, -게 하다 for the causative. And Korean uses the passive far less than English does, which matters as much as the forms.

English describes a noun with a clause that comes after it: “the book that I read yesterday”. Korean puts the clause in front of the noun and has no word for “who”, “which” or “that”: the verb at the end of the clause takes a modifier ending, and the noun follows — 어제 읽은 책, literally “yesterday read book”. Three endings say whether the action is going on, finished or still to come. The same family of forms turns verbs into nouns, with 것, -기 and -음, and builds “when” with 때.

English joins two clauses with a separate word — and, but, because, if. Korean does most of this with an ending on the first verb: 먹고, 먹지만, 먹어서, 먹으면. The first verb loses its polite -요, and only the last verb of the sentence shows how polite you are being. Whether the first verb may carry the past as well depends on the ending, and that is the detail English speakers get wrong most often.

The first linking endings say “and”, “but”, “because” and “if”. The ones in this area are more precise about how the two halves relate: that the second holds in spite of the first (-아도, -더라도), that it follows without a gap (-자마자), that something got in the way (-느라고, -는 바람에), or that one thing grows with another (갈수록, 먹을수록). Almost every one of them comes with restrictions — on tense, on the subject, on whether the sentence may end in a request — and those restrictions, not the meanings, are where English speakers go wrong.

English reports speech by shifting tenses and pronouns: “I am tired” becomes “she said she was tired”. Korean leaves the tense alone and changes the ending instead. The quoted sentence is put into the plain style and tied to 하다 with -고: -다고 for a statement, -냐고 for a question, -라고 for an order, -자고 for a suggestion. In conversation these shrink to -대요, -냬요, -래요 and -재요, and a few more patterns pass on what you have heard.

English shows what a speaker thinks of a sentence with little words around it — “oh”, “you know”, “I think”, “isn't it?”, “I'll”. Korean builds most of that into the last syllables of the verb. 비가 와요 states that it is raining; 비가 오네요 notices it, 비가 오죠? expects you to agree, and 비가 올 것 같아요 only guesses. These endings are where Korean conversation sounds natural or stiff, and choosing the wrong one rarely breaks the grammar — it changes the relationship.

Much of what English does with a preposition — about, according to, by, due to — Korean does with a particle and a frozen verb form: 에 대해 is literally “facing”, 에 따라 “following”. Other patterns hang on a small noun after a modifier: 김, 길, 겸, 리, 데. Each of them is short, each has its own small set of rules about what may stand before it and what may follow, and together they are a large part of what makes Korean at level 3 and 4 sound natural rather than translated.

Written Korean is not spoken Korean put on paper. A newspaper article, an essay, a diary or a report addresses nobody in particular, so it drops the polite -요 and ends its sentences in the plain style: 간다, 먹는다, 좋다. It links clauses with endings that hardly occur in conversation — -며, -고자, -므로 — it joins nouns with 및 and 또는, and it prefers precise Sino-Korean verbs such as 구입하다 to everyday native ones such as 사다. The example sentences in this area are written the way such texts are written.