Reason 7: Korean word order can be a son of a bitch but here’s | 한국은 사랑 스럽다

Reason 7: Korean word order can be a son of a bitch but here’s how you can make it easy
This is the most challenging part of learning Korean in my opinion but I’ll explain how I’ve simplified it for myself.
First of all, for us Korean is backwards.
Not backwards in the ‘primitive’ sense of the word – I mean literally backwards. English is a S-V-O language whereas Korean is S-O-V (e.g. I went to the shop in Korean is I to the shop went).

Now, this is very easy for short sentences and there’s nothing challenging about a simple sentence like I went to the shop. The problem is when you have relative clauses or longer sentences with extra information embedded in it.

For example, a sentence like “Remember that pretty girl who works at Samsung that I met yesterday?” is where an English speaker would have huge headaches.

A few months ago sentences like this were making my hair fall out!

The trick I’ve found useful is to practise breaking it down into its smaller parts (sometimes I use what linguists call phrase tree diagrams (Google it) to help visualise it too).

I did this on paper for a while but these days I don’t need to. It comes much more naturally with practise:

“Remember that pretty girl who works at Samsung that I met yesterday?”

Subject: the pretty girl

Main verb: remember

All the extra information: who works at Samsung that I met yesterday

So if we only had to say “Remember that pretty girl?” it would be very straightforward.

The rest of the sentence describes the girl. It works like a big long adjective coming before the subject.

The reason why this is weird for us as English speakers is that in English we tend to state the person or thing we’re talking about right at the beginning in a sentence like this. Before I say anything else about where she works or when we met, you know that I’m going to talk about a pretty girl.

In Korean you say all of the descriptive stuff before you even mention the girl.

So if you’re a really slow speaker then the person you’re talking to is not going to know who you’re talking about at first, especially if it’s a long sentence.

This gets really awkward sometimes!

One thing you can do as a new learner to fake it till you make it is say the same thing by making lots of little sentences – e.g. “Remember the pretty girl? I met her yesterday. She works at Samsung.”

My other vital bit of advice for you is this: STOP THINKING IN ENGLISH!

I use caps so you realise how important this point is.

If you’re thinking in English and trying to say sentences like the example above in the middle of a conversation then you’re going to really confuse yourself.

The sooner you start thinking in Korean, however limited it may be, the more coherent your sentences will be.