Lesson 6: Korean Honorifics
Conjugating with Honorifics
In Lesson 5, you learned how to conjugate verbs and adjectives into the past, present and future forms. You also learned that those conjugations are hardly ever used in speech and are most often used when writing a book, test, article or diary. In this lesson, you will learn the basic word conjugations that are more commonly used in speech.
What are Honorifics in Korean?
To this point, you haven't learned anything about Honorifics (from this website, at least). In Korean, depending on who you are speaking to, you must use different conjugations of the same word. The different conjugations imply respect and politeness to the person you are speaking to. Depending on that person's age and/or seniority in relation to yours, you must speak differently to that person.
The reason this is so hard for English speakers to understand is that we have nothing like this in English. We can make some sentences sound polite by adding 'please' and 'thank you,' but you can only use those words in a limited amount of sentences. For example, if somebody asked you "where did you go yesterday?" You could respond:
I went to school yesterday.
In English, regardless of whether you were speaking to your girlfriend's grandfather or your best friend, that sentence would look and sound exactly the same. In Korean, you must use a higher respect form when speaking to somebody older or higher in position. Unless you are literally just starting to learn Korean (in which case, some Korean people would let it pass) you must always do this.
Never, never underestimate the importance of honorific endings in Korean.
Keep in mind that all these conjugations with different honorific endings have exactly the same meaning. You will learn how to conjugate using honorifics in the following ways:
1. Informal low respect
Used when talking to your friends, people you are close with, people younger than you and your family.
2. Informal high respect
This can be used in most situations, even in formal situations despite the name being "informal." This is usually the way most people speak when they are trying to show respect to the person they are talking to.
3. Formal high respect
This is a very high respect form that is used when addressing people who deserve a lot of respect from you. It is hard to describe perfectly, but honestly, the difference between 'Informal high respect' and 'Formal high respect' is not very big. As long as you speak in either of these two ways, you will not offend anyone.
The names of each form of speech might be different in every source, but I have chosen the words above to describe each form. In addition, you learned the "Plain form" in the previous lesson.
Before you start! Remember the rule you learned in : When adding something to a word stem, if the last vowel in the stem is ㅏ or ㅗ, you must add 아 plus whatever you are adding. If the last vowel is anything other than ㅏ or ㅗ, you must add 어 plus whatever you are adding. If the syllable of the stem is 하, you add 하여 which can be shortened to 해.
Also, in the previous lesson, you learned that if a stem of a word ends in a vowel, "~았/었다" gets merged to the actual stem itself when conjugating into the past tense.
In this lesson, two of the conjugations you will learn will require the addition of ~아/어. When adding ~아/어 to the stem of a word, the same rule applies from previous lesson. That is, if ~아/어 gets added to a stem that ends in a vowel, ~아/어 will be merged to the stem itself. For example:
