English speakers arrive at Korean speech levels expecting something like politeness — please, sir, would you mind. It isn't that. Politeness in English is vocabulary you can add or leave out. In Korean it's grammar you cannot avoid, because every verb ending already takes a position on your relationship with the person listening.
Bill Edwards
·8 min read
In English you say I'm going to your boss, your grandmother and your closest friend. The register shifts around it — you might add just or I'll be heading off — but the sentence itself is the same object.
Korean has no such object. The verb ending forces a choice every time:
| «I'm going» | Level | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| 갑니다 gamnida | 격식체 — formal | Presentations, the news, a customer, the military |
| 가요 gayo | 해요체 — polite everyday | Almost every adult you meet. The safe default |
| 가 ga | 반말 — plain | Close friends, people clearly younger, family |
You can't decline to choose. Even silence about the relationship is a choice — the ending has already spoken for you.
This is why the usual English framing fails. It isn't «formal Korean» and «casual Korean» the way we'd mean it. It's closer to a language where the grammar contains a compulsory field for who am I to you, and every sentence fills it in.
There's a second layer that catches people out around month six.
The speech level tracks who you're speaking to. But Korean also has honorific marking for the person you're speaking about — usually the infix 시, plus a set of special words. 있다 becomes 계시다 when the subject deserves respect; 먹다 becomes 드시다.
So a sentence can be casual toward your friend and honorific about your friend's father, at the same time, in the same clause. Two independent dials. English has nothing structurally similar, which is why it takes a while to stop hearing it as «extra politeness» and start hearing it as information.
If you conjugate an English verb wrong, you sound like a learner. If you pick the wrong Korean speech level, you've said something about the relationship — and the listener has no way to know you didn't mean it.
반말 with someone older or senior reads as presumptuous or dismissive, depending on the context. It's the one that actually causes friction.
Formal with a close friend doesn't offend, but it's cold. It puts distance where there wasn't any, which is why 반말 between friends is a genuine milestone — there's even a phrase for proposing it, 말 놓자, roughly «let's drop the formality».
Practise with partners who hold a consistent relationship with you, so the level stops being a decision and becomes a reflex.
Three things, roughly in this order:
Notice what that list means for a learner: the first two are usually knowable in the first thirty seconds of meeting someone, and the third defaults to «not yet». Which gives you a rule that covers almost everything.
Learn 가요-form first and stay there for a long time. Polite everyday is appropriate with essentially any adult you meet, in almost any situation. It's warm without being familiar, and nobody has ever been offended by it.
Then, in order:
The reason this is the real difficulty of Korean, rather than the alphabet everyone worries about, is that no amount of vocabulary substitutes for it. You can know the word and still not know which version of yourself is allowed to say it — and that judgement only comes from hearing a lot of Korean spoken between people who know each other.
Frequently asked
Verb endings that change depending on who you're speaking to. «I'm going» is 갑니다 in formal speech, 가요 in polite everyday speech and 가 in 반말, the plain form used with close friends and people younger than you. There is no neutral option — every sentence takes a position on the relationship.
해요체, the 가요 form. It's appropriate with essentially any adult in almost any situation — warm without being familiar — and nobody is offended by it. Learn to recognise the formal and plain forms long before you start producing them.
The plain speech level, used with close friends, family and people clearly younger. Switching to it is a real milestone in a relationship, negotiated rather than assumed — there's even a phrase for proposing it, 말 놓자. Using it with someone older or senior without that step reads as presumptuous.
Speech levels track who you're speaking to; honorifics track who you're speaking about. They're independent, so you can be casual toward your friend and honorific about your friend's father in the same sentence. Honorifics mostly show up as the infix 시 and a set of special verbs like 계시다 and 드시다.
Because it's one of the main things that determines which speech level is appropriate, so it isn't small talk — it's information the grammar needs. That's why Korean speakers often establish relative age early in a first conversation.
Korean in Lemma, from TOPIK 1 to 3
The saga closes with 반말 — the moment two people stop speaking formally to each other — because that shift is a story beat, not a grammar chapter.
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