A Stress-Free Guide To The Korean Past Tense

If you’re looking to learn Korean for more than just ordering food or directions, it’s time to start using different tenses – and the Korean past tense is a great jumping-off point.

You'll use the past tense all the time, be it in everyday conversation, when making friends, or just making small talk. 

Thankfully, it’s much easier in Korean than in English. 

Below, I’ll look at why that is, as well as exploring how to do it. Here’s what you’ll learn in this post:

1. Why is it easy to form the past tense in Korean?
2. Politeness
3. The Infinitive in Korean
4. Forming the past tense
5. Forming the past continuous tense
6. Useful words and examples in context

By the way, if you want to learn Korean fast and have fun while doing it, my top recommendation is Korean Uncovered which teaches you through my fun, unique and effective StoryLearning® method.

If you’re ready to get started, click here for a 7-day FREE trial. 

Why Is It Easy To Form The Past Tense In Korean?

Like Japanese or Turkish – among many others – Korean is an agglutinative language. Details such as tense are formed by adding to words, rather than changing them or the sentence structure. 

English words are often changed or replaced when the tense, subject, or number of the sentence changes. When changing tense in Korean, much of the original word remains unchanged. 

Think of one of the worst offenders in English, “is”.

In the past tense, we need a completely new word, “was”. If the subject of the sentence is plural, we instead have to use “were”. 

Let’s compare that to Korean. The closest word to “is” in Korean is 있어.

Notice how in Korean, you don't change the original word, you simply add to it. With a plural subject, the past tense remains the same. 

This will be a pattern throughout what we look at today. Korean behaves as it should most of the time, so it’s really easy to get your head around. 

Politeness In Korean

If you’re at the point that you’re reading about specific tenses in Korean, you’re likely already very familiar with this, so I won’t go into too much detail. 

I’ll present everything today with three options:

1. Casual formality: used with those younger than you and with friends.

2. Low formality: a good catch-all as a budding Korean learner. Polite, but not overly so.

3. High formality: used in public service announcements, on the news, to superiors in a workplace, and those older than you. Many younger Koreans are moving away from this even in the workplace, and won’t demand it from their subordinates or younger employees.

It’s probably a good idea to focus primarily on learning low formality initially. It will allow you to speak with friends without sounding overly polite and won’t offend anyone older than you.

The Infinitive In Korean

An infinitive is another name for a verb when it’s unconjugated. All of our examples in this post will start with this.

In English, we write the infinitive as “to + verb.”

• To
  • see
  • read
  • do

In Korean, unconjugated verbs end in 다.

• 보다 (to see)
• 읽다 (to read)
• 하다 (to do)

How To Form The Past Tense In Korean

To conjugate a Korean verb, you first need to remove the 다 ending. 

Then, you look at the last vowel in the verb stem.

• If the verb ends in ㅗ or ㅏ, you add 았어요.
• If the last vowel isn’t ㅗ or 아, you add 었어요.

Much like present tense verbs, some verbs that end in a vowel will combine.

For example: 

• 가다 + 았어요 becomes 갔어요, not 가았어요.   
• 보다 + 았어요 becomes 봤어요 not 보았어요.

Casual formality looks like this:

Verb + 았어 or 었어

Low formality looks like this:

Verb + 았어요 or 었어요

High formality looks like this:

Verb + 았습니다 or 었습니다

As you can see from the table above, Korea follows a series of easily memorable rules and generally sticks to them.

You won’t have to worry yourself learning countless exception words as you would in English.

How To Form The Past Continuous Tense In Korean

You use the past continuous to talk about something that was taking place in the past and continued for some time:

• I was running.
• He was eating.
• They were drinking.

You might have been surprised to see this here. In English, this would probably be considered a little more advanced.

In Korean, this is done in the same way for every single verb. It’s easier than forming the past tense. 

As we did with the past tense, we start by dropping the 다 ending. 

However, after that, you always add 고 + 있었어/있었어요/있었습니다. Once you’ve done it once, you’ve done it a thousand times!

Casual formality looks like this:

Verb + 고 있었어

Low formality looks like this:

Verb + 고 있었어요

High formality looks like this:

Verb + 고 있었습니다

Because we’re always adding 고, you don’t even need to consider the vowel at the end of the verb.

It’s so easy that you can use it as a bit of a cheat if you’re not sure of the correct past tense ending. It won’t be perfect but you’ll be understood, which is good enough, despite what the grammar villain might be whispering in your ear!

Useful Words And Past Tense Examples In Context

Next, I’ll include a few words you can use when talking about things in the past tense, and some examples of how that might look.

Some of these will be related to past tense and some are just useful as you begin making longer sentences:

• 그때 (at that time)
• -전에 (before)
• -때문에 (because)
• -ㄹ 때 (marking a specific point in time to be referred to)

Here are those examples:

• 그때 나는 공부하고 있었어 (At that time, I was studying. Literally: At that time I studying was)
• 그때 나는 취미가 없었어 (I had no hobbies at the time. Literally: At that time I hobby didn’t have)
• 나는 점심 전에 끝났어요 (I finished before lunch. Literally: I lunch before finished)
• 저는 운동하기 전에 물을 마셨어요 (I drank water before I exercised. Literally: I exercised before water drank)
• 나는 피곤했기 때문에 잠을 잤어요 (I slept because I was tired. Literally: I was tired because slept)
• 전쟁 때문에 저는 도망을 갔어요 (I escaped because of the war. Literally: War because I escaped)
• 제가 어릴때 이 책을 읽었어요 (I read this book when I was a child. Literally: I in childhood this book read)
• 운전할 때 저는 음악들었어요 (I listened to music while I was driving. Literally: While driving I music listened)

Notice how the order of the sentence in English bears very little resemblance to the order of the Korean. That’s partly because they have a different grammatical structure.

It’s also because you get a certain amount of leeway when translating between languages that are this different. As long as you preserve the meaning, it’s best to make it sound as natural as possible in English. 

Getting Stuck Into The Basics

While it might seem a little daunting at first, it’s really easy to sink your teeth into past tense in Korean. 

So, as you’ve seen above, most of the time you’re simply adding to a word, rather than changing it.

And this means you’re not learning new words every time: you’ll get a great deal of mileage out of the vocabulary you already know when you move onto a new tense or grammatical structure. 

As you begin using more complicated Korean, the past tense is a great start. It will allow you to talk about more sophisticated things and express yourself more clearly.

In addition, many of the rules you’ve learned today will give you a leg up when you move onto other tenses in Korean too.

So, start talking about yesterday, today! And if you're not quite ready to express yourself, follow the rules of StoryLearning® and immerse yourself in short stories in Korean where the past tense will pop up all the time and soon feel natural to you.

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.