language learnings #2
French and Korean Formal Conjugations
Recently I have been going back to studying Korean and the grammar structure that they use.
I’ve been blessed to study French in my youth along with growing up speaking and studying a bit of Mandarin throughout my life, so studying Korean from scratch as an adult is a new experience.
I have the comprehension and studying tactics acquired from life, but not the sticky memory of anyone under 25.
In 2021, I mastered the Korean alphabet so I have been able to read since then, but understanding and forming my own sentences is a different hurdle.
Picking the grammar structure back up this year, I’ve been learning about the different tones of speaking such as formal, social, and very conversational. While learning about such, I realized the similarities it has with the French “vous” form.
Within the French language, “Vous” is the formal term for “you” or addressing an audience as “you.” I have only studied French in great detail, but I understand that romance languages conjugate verbs to the nouns. “Tu” is the casual term for “you” that one would use amongst friends.
In Korean, thankfully the noun does not change, but the verb conjugation changes depending on the receiver. There is also a third layer of formality. Korea has the formal layer, the social layer, and the very casual layer (labeled as “slang” by my lesson course).
Without having some French background, this concept may have been very new, but knowing this makes it easier to picture what circumstance to conjugate verbs and the idea of conjugating verbs per audience is no stranger to me.