Hi! Today, we'll talk about major differences between Korean and most of the European languages,
particularly English because this lesson is in English.
You may ask: 'Why do I need this?' This has nothing to do with learning Korean.
Well, the most challenging things when we learn a foreign language are
vocabulary, grammar, and the ability to make sentences using this vocabulary and grammar.
To be able to make sentences you should be familiar with the sentence structure of this language.
If you have no idea about the sentence structure
it may slow down your learning process,
especially speaking, writing, and even understanding texts.
That's why there are many Korean language learners who know some vocabulary and grammar
but they struggle with making complex sentences
or those who even after learning Korean for more than one year,
when they read a text in Korean,
they know every word and every grammatical structure
but they cannot translate the text.
For this reason before starting to learn the Korean grammar, I want to show you
how different Korean sentences are from English sentences.
Knowing this information in advance is going to help you to speed up your learning process.
So, the Korean language belongs to the Altaic language family
and all languages from this family share similar sentence structure.
I would say up to 90%.
This sentence structure is different from the European languages,
Southeast Asian languages, Chinese, and Arabic
but similar to many Indian languages.
The reason why I am telling you all this is
if you speak one of these languages
then learning Korean is going to be a bit easier for you and
and if in the future you will decide to learn any of these languages
Then you will learn it faster than others who don't know these languages.
So, there are about 25 languages in this family including Turkish, Central Asian languages,
Mongolian, Korean, Japanese,
and several others used in the Asian part of Russia.
By the way, most of people who live on these territories colored in dark blue
can understand each other up to 80 or 90%
without even learning each other's language.
It's because their vocabulary is very similar.
Okay, the first thing that most of the European languages have and Korean doesn't have are articles.
It makes it easier to learn Korean.
The second thing is the same verb form regardless of a number of subjects performing an action,
whether it's one person or more than one person.
Also, the verb form is the same regardless of the subject's gender.
In Korean you don't have to conjugate the verb whether the subject is he or she
unlike Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, or Russian
where you do have to conjugate verbs and even adjectives depending on the subject gender.
The third major difference between Korean and most of the other languages
is the word order.
In the Korean language, you should put verbs at the end of a sentence.
Like so.
'I Korean learn.'
'You tea drink.'
'We games play.'
'He book write.' Okay?
And if it's a complex sentence like
'I learn Korean and he writes a book.'
put the verbs at the end of its own sentence.
'I Korean learn' and 'He book write.'
This is the sentence #1
and this is the sentence #2.
You shouldn't put both 'Learn' and 'Write' at the end.
Okay?
So now let's take a look at the word order for prepositions.
'I was born in Korea.'
'Put this on the table.'
'Tell about yourself.'
First, we took these verbs and put them at the end of the sentence.
Next thing what we have to do is to take these prepositions
and put them after nouns they are related to.
In the Korean language prepositions are called postpositions
because they're placed after nouns not before like in English.
Take a look at this sentence.
You should be familiar with it.
In the previous lesson, we learned a few phrases
and one of them was
I came from
your country name
저는 / country name / 에서 왔습니다.
We used this word order.
'He came from Peru' in Korean is
그는 페루에서 왔습니다.
Okay?
So, the next difference is a sentence ending.
There are 4 types of sentences you can find in any language
Declarative
Interrogative
Imperative, and Exclamatory
'I go to school' is a statement. It can be positive or negative.
For example, 'I don't go to school'
It's a negative sentence, but it's still a statement, right?
'Do I go to school?' is a question.
'Please, go to school.'
is a suggestion or advice.
'Go to school!' is a command.
And 'Wow! You go to school!'
is an exclamation.
So in Korean language, depending on the type of a sentence
you should add different sentence ending particles.
'I go to school in Korean' is
저는 학교에 갑니다.
가요. / 가. / 간다.
Do I go to school? is
저는 학교에 갑니까?
가요? / 가? / 가냐? / 가니?
You may ask why there are 3 versions of everything.
It's because there are 3 levels of politeness in the Korean language.
And depending on who you are talking to,
you should either say
갑니다. / 가요.
or 가. / 간다.
If you talk to older people say '갑니다'.
And if you talk to kids or friends you can say '가' or '간다', okay?
So the same sentence in imperative form would be
학교에 가십시오.
가세요. / 가요. / 가.
These four can be a command or an advice depending on intonation.
And to express a surprise, you can say
학교에 가는군요!
학교에 가는구나!
학교에 가는군!
학교에 가네요.
or 학교에 가네.
We took a verb as an example and in Korean language
adjectives and nouns also have sentence endings which are
99% same as verb sentence endings.
For example,
'This book is expensive.'
이 책이 비쌉니다.
비싸요. / 비싸. / 비싸다.
Or
Is this book expensive? is
이 책이 비쌉니까? / 비싸요? / 비싸? / 비싸냐? / 비싸니?
Imperative form for adjectives doesn't exist in all languages.
So, exclamatory form for 비싸다 is
비싸군요! / 비싸구나! / 비싸군! / 비싸네요. / 비싸네.
If you are lost or have a headache because of all what I have explained until now,
it's totally fine. You're not the only one.
You don't have to memorize all these things now.
It's not the purpose of this lesson.
It's just a quick overview of the Korean grammar.
I wanted to show you how the Korean language is different from English
because if you know this information in advance,
it is going to help you to learn Korean faster.
So don't worry if you didn't understand most of this. Okay?
I will explain this in more detail in future lessons.
Okay, let's take a look at sentence endings for Nouns.
They are slightly different from Verbs and Adjective sentence endings.
'This is a book' would be
이것은 책입니다.
책이에요.
책이요. / 책이야. / 책이다.
And if you want to ask 'Is this a book?'
then say
이것은 책입니까?
책이에요?
책이요? / 책이야? / 책이냐? / 책이니?
And to express surprise say
이것은 책이군요!
이것은 책이구나!
이것은 책이군!
책이네요. / 책이네.
So we are done with sentence ending
and the last difference between Korean and English I want to draw your attention to is
how to compose sentences in Korean.
Korean is an Agglutinative language.
What does this mean?
For example, if you want to say something like
If I did not watch...
In English you use 3 different parts of speech
If / did / not
in order to say that the verb [ watch ] is in a negative form,
In the Past Tense,
and it's conditional, right?
And if you want to say the same thing in Korean,
what you have to do is
to attach different particles to the verb or an adjective
like so
Take a look at a few more examples.
If I buy this...
I bought this but...
Because I bought this...
Before I bought this is...
So starting from the next lesson
we will talk about grammatical particles like what you see over here.
And we will learn how to use them to make complex sentences like this one
Today I was going to meet my friend, but
제가 오늘 제 친구를 만나려고 했는데...
이 친구가 갑자기 전화해서...
this friend suddenly called and...
서울로 가야 한다고 했으니까...
because he said that he had to go to Seoul
못 만났어요 [ mon manna sso yo ]
I could not meet him.
Okay, that's all for today
I hope now you have some idea about what the Korean language is like
and how it is different from your native language.
You have two homework.
The first is to learn these words
as we are going to use them in the next lesson.
And the second is to practice reading in Korean as fast as you can.
Okay, if you have any questions or suggestions on how to improve this course
or what do you think about this course, you can leave them in the comments.
Thank you in advance and have a great day! ^^