Hello!
Welcome back!
In this lesson you will learn
how to give instructions, advice,
express a command,
give a direction or how to do requests.
To build such sentences you need to know
this grammatical construction.
A verb stem plus
‘~십시오’ or ‘~으십시오’
If a verb stem ends with a vowel
use ‘~십시오’
and if it ends with a consonant
use ‘~으십시오’
Let's take a look at a few examples.
‘Please, go to that direction / side.’
‘저 쪽으로 가십시오.’
‘‘Please, sit down here.’
‘여기 앉으십시오.’
‘Please, give me a call when / if Cholsu comes back.’
‘철수 씨 돌아오면 저한테 전화를 주십시오.’
‘Please, start eating first.’
‘먼저 드십시오.’
This grammatical construction has a few variants
same as sentence endings ‘~ㅂ니다’ and ‘~습니다’
So, depending on who you are talking to
you should use one of these four variants.
There are only three levels of politeness
in the Korean language.
Polite formal, Polite informal, and Informal.
But in a few grammatical constructions
you can see some variants
that are somewhere between
Polite informal and Informal levels of politeness.
I just marked it as ‘less polite informal’
just to distinguish it from
these two politeness levels.
I would say this variant
‘앉으십시오’,
‘가십시오’, ‘보십시오’ and so on
is rarely used.
Unless you are talking to someone
who is really very old or
has a very high position in society
or in very formal situations.
The second variant
‘~세요 / ~으세요’ is the most commonly used.
And yeah,
this grammatical construction ‘~세요 / ~으세요’
is also used as an honorific particle.
So, it has two different, not related to each other,
usage cases.
It is used for the imperative mood
and as an honorific particle.
To learn more about honorific particles
watch the Lesson #27.
Let’s take a look at how you can use
the polite informal variant of the imperative mood.
I used the same examples as what I used when
I was explaining the polite formal variant.
The only difference is
here I used a different
imperative mood sentence ending
‘~세요’ and ‘~으세요’
You can pause the video and read it for yourself.
You may wonder,
if ‘~세요 / ~으세요’
has two different usage cases
one to show a respect
and another one is to express a command,
give advice, instructions, etc.
So, how do I distinguish
if a person is just showing his respect to me
or he is giving me instructions or a command?
Well, you can easily know it
from his intonation and from the context.
The third variant is
‘~아요', '~어요', and '~여요’
These sentence endings are exactly the same
as we used for the polite informal level of politeness
in the Lesson #26.
Again, to distinguish
if a person is just showing you respect
or if he is giving you instructions
you can know it from
his intonation and the context
‘Go to that direction / side.’
‘저 쪽으로 가요.’
‘Sit down here.’ ‘여기 앉아요.’
‘Give me a call when / if Cholsu comes back.’
‘철수 씨 돌아오면 나한테 전화를 줘요.’
‘Start eating first.’ ‘먼저 먹어요.’
I want to draw your attention to a few things.
Here, I no longer use the word ‘please’
in English sentences.
Because this variant of the Imperative mood
is more like
a command or order in a polite way.
For this reason,
since it is more like a command
you should never ever use it
when you talk to strangers
or someone who is older than you.
In Korea, you cannot command
or tell what to do to someone
who is older than you.
It is unmannered and rude.
Also, in the previous examples
I used ‘저한테’ and ‘드세요’.
The reason I changed them to ‘나’ and ‘먹다’ is
because I cannot give
more respect and less respect
at the same time.
I either respect someone more or less.
So, in most cases,
the honorific words and verbs should match
the politeness levels sentence endings.
But actually, yeah, in some situations
you can say something like
‘먼저 드셔요.’
Once you get more familiar
with the Korean culture and language
you will have a sense for such nuances.
And the last variant
has the same sentence endings
as what we use
for the Informal level of politeness.
They are ‘아 / 어 / 여’.
‘Go to that direction / side.’ ‘저 쪽으로 가.’
‘Sit down here.’ ‘여기 앉아.’
‘Give me a call when / if Cholsu comes back.’
‘철수 씨 돌아오면 나한테 전화를 줘.’
‘Start eating first.’ ‘먼저 먹어.’
I hope you clearly understood
how to use this grammatical construction.
If not, feel free to ask me questions.
And here is the list of new words
I will be using in the next lesson.