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How Korean packages meaning
Korean grammar at a glance
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Common questions about Korean
What are Korean's speech levels?
Korean encodes the speaker's relationship to the listener in the verb ending. Four levels are actively used: casual 해체 (peers), polite 해요체 (default adult), formal 합쇼체 (business, news), plain/written 해라체. The verb 가다 'to go' becomes 가, 가요, 갑니다, 간다 — different ending per level, no other change. Choosing wrong is socially loud.
What does -시- do?
-시- is the subject-honorific suffix. It attaches between the verb stem and the tense ending to mark that the sentence's grammatical subject is socially elevated — a teacher, parent, elder. 가다 (to go) → 가시다 (he/she-elevated goes). Independent of speech level: you can address a friend casually but still use -시- because the topic of the sentence is your grandfather.
Is Korean SOV or SVO?
SOV. Subject before object before verb. 나는 책을 읽는다 ('I book read'). The verb sits at the end of the clause; modifiers and relative clauses precede their head; postpositions follow nouns. Because particles identify grammatical role, word order can scramble for emphasis or topic, but the verb stays put at the end.
Does Korean have grammatical gender?
No. Nouns and pronouns don't mark gender. 그 (he/she/that person) is the same word for any 3rd person. Adjectives don't change shape based on the noun. Korean is one of the few major East Asian languages without grammatical gender — and unlike English, even the pronouns don't distinguish 'he' from 'she'.
Why doesn't Korean have articles or plurals on most nouns?
Korean nouns are unspecified for number and definiteness by default. 책 means 'book', 'books', 'a book', or 'the book' depending on context. The plural marker 들 exists but is optional and used mainly with humans or for emphasis (사람들 'people'). Definiteness comes from demonstratives (이 'this', 그 'that') or context, not articles.
Sources for Korean
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Yeon, Jaehoon & Brown, Lucien (2019). Korean: A Comprehensive Grammar, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
- Martin, Samuel E. (2006). A Reference Grammar of Korean. Tokyo: Tuttle.
- Byon, Andrew Sangpil (2017). Modern Korean Grammar: A Practical Guide. London: Routledge.
- Song, Kyung-An (2010). "Various Evidentials in Korean." Proceedings of PACLIC 24, pp. 871–880.