😆Let Our Journey of Korean Language Begin!

How to Introduce Yourself in Korean🙇🏻

Hi there!👋🏻

I just realized that it’s been about 40 days since I sent you my first email! (Remember Ethan, my biggest fan from Australia?😄) How time flies! I’ve been feeling that time passes by a lot more quickly than before… I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not, but it definitely pushes me to become more productive and get more stuff done. And now that I think about it, this is probably why I started building my daily morning routine I’ve previously mentioned in another email. I’ll soon send you an update and share that part of my life as well. Anyway… what I wanted to say before we get started with today’s topic was that I would like to say thank you for being my subscriber and reading my newsletter, it is greatly appreciated🙏🏻.

Now, shall we get started?

So far, I’ve only talked about the history of the Korean writing system, aka 한글 [Hangul], but from today, we are going to start learning about Korean grammar and such so that we can start building sentences. If you already studied Korean before, take it as a review until we talk about topics that you haven’t learned yet. But remember☝🏻! There is always going to be something you can take away from what you believe you had previously learned inside and out.

Today’s topic is “How to Introduce Yourself in Korean”🙇🏻.

Well… kind of! Because you are not going to be able to go really deep about yourself and say your bias from BTS is Jungkook but Jimin comes really close and that is making your life chaotic😱!

No reason… I’m throwing a picture of these two boys just to keep you awake!😜

We are actually going to learn one verb today. Yup, that’s it… just one single verb! So, you better try and memorize this😬!

TA-DA!✨

Here we have our first verb: 이다 [i-da]

I would say this is the most basic verb in Korean (well, actually in any language), because it is equivalent to the verb “to be” in English. We use this verb all the time, don’t we?

For example:

• “Hello, I am Sean!”

• “My boyfriend is Korean.”

• “Hello? Is this a flower shop?”

• “Are you American?”

But you see the verb “to be” takes a different form when we actually use them when speaking and this is called “conjugation”. In English, conjugation means the changing of a verb’s form to express a different person, number, tense, aspect or gender, yadi yadi yada!

So, the words, 'is', 'am' and 'are', are all conjugated from their infinitive form “to be”. And this happens the same way in Korean language! The verb 이다 is in its infinitive form or sometimes it is referred to as dictionary form, because when you look up a verb in a Korean dictionary, you will always get the infinitive form of the verb. One important thing you should note is that all Korean verbs in dictionary form end with the syllable 다. In the upcoming emails, you will be introduced to some common verbs such as 하다 [hada], 먹다 [meok-da], 가다 [gada] and etc. and they all have the same ending. Now you probably want to ask me this question, “Then what is the conjugation of the verb 이다🤔?”

Well, here it is!

• 이에요 [i-e-yo]

• 예요 [e-yo]

These two are the conjugations of the verb 이다. They are in simple present tense and you have two options as you can see! Does it also depend on the subject of the sentence like in English, 'am' is paired with 'I' and 'is' is paired with 'he' or 'she'?

NOPE!🙅🏻‍♂️

Please note that Korean verbs do not conjugate differently depending on the subject of the sentence. I’ll talk more about Korean verb conjugation in the next post, but the difference between 이에요 and 예요 is very simple.

• 이에요 comes after a consonant ending word, whereas

• 예요 comes after a vowel ending word

So let’s try and write the example sentences above in Korean!

• “Hello! I am Sean.”

  • 안녕하세요! 저는 션이에요. [an-nyeong-a-se-yo! jeo-neun shyeon-i-e-yo]

• “My friend is a nurse.”

  • 제 친구는 간호사예요. [je chin-gu-neun ga-no-sa-e-yo]

• “Hello? Is this a flower shop?”

  • 여보세요? 꽃 가게예요? [yeo-bo-se-yo? ggot ga-ge-e-yo?]

• “Are you American?”

  • 미국 사람이에요? [mi-gook sa-ram-i-e-yo?]

Vocab: 안녕하세요 = Hello, 제 = my, 친구 = friend, 의사 = doctor, 여보세요 = hello (answering a call), 꽃 = flower, 가게 = store, shop, 미국 = America, 사람 = person

As you can see, 이에요 is placed after consonant ending words and 예요 comes after vowel ending words and the conjugation has nothing to do with the subject of the sentence. Also, you might have already noticed that the verb is placed at the end of each sentence whether it is a statement or a question!

So, here is a summary of today’s lesson:

1. Korean verbs in their infinitive form end with 다.

2. The verb “to be” in Korean is 이다.

3. 이다 is conjugated to 이에요 and 예요.

   1. 이에요 is placed after a consonant ending word

   2. 예요 is placed after a vowel ending word

4. Korean verbs are placed at the end of the sentence whether it is declarative or interrogative.

5. 예요 is pronounced [e-yo], not [ye-yo].

That’s it for today! Is it digestible? Did everything make sense to you? Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.

From now on, I will be asking you to write a simple sentence with the grammar form of the day in the comments. This way, I know you are following my notes and we get to check if you understand everything and be able to apply it in your own sentence. And I can correct you if you make any mistakes😉!

So, let’s see if you have understood everything today… I would like to ask you to write “Hello, I am (your name).” in Korean, just like one of the example sentences above. If you don’t know how your name is written in Korean, let me know in the comments!

다음에 또 봐!💙