Korean (from English)

1. About Korean

Korean (한국어, hangugeo) is spoken by roughly 80 million people, chiefly in South and North Korea, with large communities in China, the United States, Japan and Central Asia. Linguists usually treat it as a language isolate (or the sole widely-spoken member of a small Koreanic family alongside the Jeju language). For an English speaker it is genetically and structurally unrelated to English — but it rewards effort quickly, because its alphabet is one of the most learnable in the world.¹

Three pieces of good news on day one. First, the writing system, Hangul, is a logical alphabet you can learn to sound out in a few days — not thousands of characters. Second, Korean has no grammatical gender, no articles (a/the), and verbs do not change for person or number (no 'I am / he is' agreement to memorise). Third, sounds map fairly consistently to spelling. The real new skills are: a Subject–Object–Verb word order, small grammatical 'particles' that mark each noun's role, a system of politeness built into the verb, and two sets of numbers.

Key features to know from day one

• Word order is Subject–Object–Verb: the verb always comes last. 'I eat rice' is literally 'I rice eat' (저는 밥을 먹어요).²
• Particles do the work English does with word order and prepositions. A short marker is attached after a noun to show whether it is the topic, the subject, the object, a location, and so on — so order is flexible except that the verb stays at the end.²
• No grammatical gender and no articles. 책 (chaek) is 'book', 'a book' or 'the book' depending only on context.
• Politeness is grammatical, not optional. The ending of the verb changes with your relationship to the listener; beginners learn the friendly-polite 해요 (haeyo) style first.⁴
• There are two number systems — native Korean and Sino-Korean — each used in different situations.³
• Korean is agglutinative: meaning is built by stacking suffixes and particles onto a stem, much like adding beads to a string.

2. Hangul: the Korean alphabet

Hangul (한글) was created under King Sejong the Great and promulgated in 1446. It is a featural alphabet: the basic consonant shapes are stylised pictures of the speech organs making the sound (ㄴ shows the tongue touching the ridge behind the teeth), and the vowels are built from three strokes symbolising heaven (·), earth (ㅡ) and the human being (ㅣ). There are 24 basic letters — 14 consonants and 10 vowels — and they are not written in a straight line but packed into square syllable blocks of an initial consonant, a vowel, and an optional final consonant.¹

The 14 basic consonants

The 10 basic vowels

Reading a block: 한 (han) is ㅎ (h) + ㅏ (a) + ㄴ (n). A vertical vowel such as ㅏ sits to the right of the first consonant; a horizontal vowel such as ㅗ sits underneath it; any final consonant (받침, batchim) goes at the bottom. So 곰 is ㄱ-ㅗ-ㅁ = 'gom' (bear).

A note on romanization: this guide writes Korean in Hangul first and adds the official Revised Romanization in parentheses as a learning aid only.⁵ Trust the Hangul — romanization can never capture every sound, and your goal from week one is to read the script itself.

3. Greetings & essential words

Numbers: two systems

Korean keeps two full sets of numbers. Use native Korean numbers for counting things and people, for someone's age, and for the hour of the clock; use Sino-Korean numbers for dates, money, minutes, phone numbers, addresses and any number from 100 up.³

4. Particles, the copula & politeness

Topic, subject and object particles

Three particles do most of the early work. The topic particle 은/는 frames what the sentence is about ('as for…'); the subject particle 이/가 marks the doer, often when introducing new information; the object particle 을/를 marks the thing the verb acts on. Each has two shapes, chosen by whether the noun ends in a consonant or a vowel.²

Two more you will meet immediately: 에 (e) marks a destination or a point in time ('집에 가요', I go home), 에서 (eseo) marks the place where an action happens ('학교에서 공부해요', I study at school), 도 (do) means 'also/too', and 의 (ui) is the possessive 's.

The copula 이다 and the 해요 style

To say 'A is B', attach the copula to the noun: 이에요 after a consonant, 예요 after a vowel. 저는 학생이에요 = 'I am a student'; 저는 가수예요 = 'I am a singer'. The more formal equivalent is 입니다 (imnida).

Speech levels

Korean grammaticalises politeness through verb endings. The 합니다체 (hamnida-che) is formal-polite, used in announcements, business and the military; the 해요체 (haeyo-che) is the warm, everyday polite style; 반말 (banmal) is the plain/intimate style for close friends and children. Learn 해요 first — it is appropriate almost everywhere a beginner speaks.⁴

5. Beyond the basics

Now we move from single words to real sentences: asking questions, talking about the past, and saying 'no'. All examples stay in the friendly-polite 해요 style you already know.

Asking questions

In the 해요 style a yes/no question looks exactly like a statement — you simply raise your intonation and add a question mark (밥 먹어요? = 'Are you eating?'). For specific questions, drop in a question word where the answer would go; Korean does not move it to the front the way English does.⁶

The past tense: -았어요 / -었어요

To put a verb in the polite past, take the verb stem and add -았어요 if the stem's last vowel is a bright ㅏ or ㅗ, and -었어요 otherwise; the verb 하다 ('to do') is irregular and becomes 했어요. Vowel-final stems contract: 가 + 았어요 → 갔어요.⁶

Saying 'no': 안 and 못

Korean has two short negatives placed right before the verb: 안 means 'not' (a simple negative — 안 가요 = 'I'm not going'), while 못 means 'cannot' (an inability — 못 가요 = 'I can't go'). There is also a longer form, verb stem + -지 않다, with the same meaning as 안.⁶

🚧 In development. A large share of Korean vocabulary is Sino-Korean (한자어), built from roots shared with Chinese and Japanese; learning these roots multiplies your vocabulary (학 'study' → 학생 student, 학교 school, 대학 university). A full word-building strategy will be added here.

🚧 In development. This section will treat the subject honorific -시-, the humble/honorific vocabulary pairs (먹다 vs 드시다, 있다 vs 계시다), and differences between Seoul standard and regional speech. Not yet complete.

🚧 In development. Planned: 눈치 (reading the room), age- and status-based address terms, indirect speech and softening, and idiom. Not yet complete.

🚧 In development. Planned: native-like prosody and connected speech, advanced writing registers, and a media-immersion plan (news, drama, podcasts). Not yet complete.

• National Institute of Korean Language (국립국어원) — the official language authority of South Korea
• King Sejong Institute — Nuri-Sejonghakdang — free official Korean-learning resources
• Hangul — overview — the writing system, with letter charts