Learn Korean

Vocabulary

안녕하세요 - Hello (Polite/Formal)
안녕히 계세요 - Goodbye (Polite/Formal)
안녕히 가세요 - Goodbye (Polite/Formal)
만나서 반가워요 - Nice to meet you (Polite)

저 - I/Me (Polite/Formal)
이름 - Name

~이에요/예요 - To be (Polite)
~은/는 - Topic particle
~의 - Ownership particle

네 - Yes
아니요 - No (Polite)

The vocabulary looks complicated lol. But it's not because you have me to explain it 😉.

안녕하세요
If you don't know what this means, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Lol jk, but fr. This means "Hello" as you can see. It's used just like "Hello" in English. The only thing is that grammatically, it's considered a question. So it's not weird to see it with a question mark.

안녕하세요 is used in polite and formal situations. Not really in informal situations. You'll learn that in the next lessons.

But what do I mean by polite, formal, and informal? Well, If you haven't heard before, Korea is serious about respect when it comes to age and social status. So they have incorporated it into their language so that the words you use and the way you conjugate verbs depend on who you're talking to. I have made names three basic levels:

Informal - When talking to close friends and family, people who have a lower status than you, and people you know are younger than you.

Polite - When talking to strangers, acquaintances, people older than you, people who have a higher status than you.

Formal - When talking to strangers, acquaintances, people older than you, people who have a higher status than you.

Polite and Formal are the kind of same, but Formal is more formal haha. When talking to strangers both of them are appropriate, but if you're not sure just use Formal. Like if I was in a situation where I had to talk to someone like my boss or my Mother-in-Law, I would use Formal.

But you barely learned anything yet so just keep that in mind.

안녕히 계세요 vs 안녕히 가세요
These two are gotten mixed up by beginners so much and it's sad. So I'm going to tell you guys the difference. As you can see, they both mean "goodbye". A late beginner/intermediate Korean learner can tell the difference right away and I'll tell you why in a second.

안녕히 계세요 is used when you are leaving and the person you are talking to is staying.

안녕히 가세요 is used when the person you are talking to is leaving you.

How can people tell the difference:

In 안녕히 계세요, 계세요 means like "please stay" while 안녕히 means "peacefully". So it literally means, "please stay peacefully".

In 안녕히 가세요, 가세요 means something like "please go". So it literally means "please go peacefully".

These have very easy differences as you can see, so you shouldn't get them mixed up.

Korean Word Order
Before we get into actual grammar, I want to talk about word order in Korean. It is similar to English in some ways, but mostly different.