Conjugation and Some Basic Verbs in Present Tense

We’re progressing to the point of not just learning basic verbs to commit to memory (이다, “to be”), but to understand some other basic verbs and the logic of their conjugation. There are certainly irregular cases that I’ll add to later, and God knows the Koreans love to fuse vowels together if they can. No matter, here’s the basic logic for conjugating some rudimentary verbs to their present tense.

Take, for example, the verb (가다, “to go”). 다 in this would be the equivalent of “to” and 가 identifies the verb in consideration (“go”). 다 will always drop off in conjugation (like “to” in “to go” in English), and its conjugation depends on the vowel in the preceding block. That vowel, in this case, happens to be ㅏ. If it’s ㅏ or ㅗ , the suffix is 아요. That would make this 가아요. However, the double “a” sound would be weird to anyone with the silent consonant all that’s separating the two. Thus, it gets fused to a conjugation of 가요. Consider another basic form of this: 보다 (to see/watch). The 다 drops off for conjugation. What’s left is 보. The vowel in that is ㅗ and its conjugation logic by this rule would result in 보아요. However, Koreans love to fuse their vowels together if they can. The combination of “o” (ㅗ) and “a” (ㅏ) as vowel sounds creates a “wa” sound when they collide. The Koreans have a special vowel for this: 와. The end result of this conjugation is 봐요.

There are two forks for if that vowel in the base of the verb isn’t ㅏ or ㅗ. The first fork, which seems(?) more common, is to conjugate with 어요. For example, 먹다 is the infinitive “to eat”. The vowel in the base form of 먹 isn’t ㅏ or ㅗ, therefore its conjugation is 먹어요. In this simple example, there is consonant as the last character in the preceding block. It can get a bit peculiar when the last character in the preceding block is the vowel itself. For example, 쓰다 (to write) would have this rule in principle because the preceding vowel isn’t ㅏ or ㅗ. However, the vowel is the last character and Koreans love to fuse vowels if they can. However, no such fusion of ㅡ andㅓ exist in their alphabet (or even their sound combinations, as far I know). Something has to win, and in this case ㅡ is dropped for ㅓ as a vowel. The conjugation is 써요. There’s another irregular case too of 마시다 (to drink). The combination of those vowels (ㅣandㅓ) isn’t a vowel in the Korean alphabet. In this case, the sound of that fusion becomes kind of a “yeo”, which is ㅕ. That final conjugation form is 마셔요. Hey, I don’t make the rules. I just have to understand them.

The last conjugation rule (that we’ve learned so far, at least) concerns verbs where the preceding block is 하. These are always(?) conjugated as -해요. As one example: 공부하다 is “to study”. Its present form conjugation is 공부해요.

Okie doke, onto some examples:

Verbs with Preceding Vowels of ㅏ or ㅗ

Verbs without Preceding Vowels of ㅏ or ㅗ

Verbs With 하

Some Example Sentences