The move from formal speech to casual speech in Korean is granted rather than taken. There is an explicit moment where the older or senior person invites the other to drop the formal endings, and until that moment arrives both people keep using them. A learner who does not know this waits to be told, and the other person waits because inviting is their move, and the relationship stays at arm's length indefinitely.
Which means the most useful thing on this page is not a table of endings. It is knowing that the switch is an event, that it has to be offered, and that you can ask for it.
The registers, in six lines
- 합니다, 해요, 해, the same verb in formal polite, ordinary polite and plain. The middle one is where a learner should live and is correct almost everywhere.
- 존댓말 and 반말, respectful speech and plain speech. Using the second with somebody older or unfamiliar is a genuine offence rather than a mild informality.
- -시- raises the subject, inserted into the verb to honour the person being spoken about, which is separate from honouring the person being spoken to.
- 드시다 replaces 먹다, to eat, when the eater is somebody you are honouring. As in Japanese, the whole verb is swapped rather than modified.
- age decides the register more than status does, which is why Koreans establish age early in a first conversation. It is a practical question, not a personal one.
- the register is chosen before the sentence, not adjusted during it, so there is no way to stay neutral while you work out the relationship.
Two levels do almost all of the work
Textbooks list several speech levels and most of them are historical or restricted to particular settings. In ordinary life two carry nearly everything: the polite ending used with strangers, shopkeepers, colleagues and anybody older, and the casual form used with friends and with people clearly younger. A third, the formal one, turns up in announcements, presentations, the military and the news, and it is worth recognising rather than producing.
The choice is made in the last syllables of every sentence, so it cannot be avoided and there is no neutral setting. Whatever you say, you have said something about the distance between you and the person listening, and saying nothing about it is not available.
What decides the choice is relative age and position rather than warmth, which is why a Korean conversation between strangers establishes those facts early and directly. Being asked your age in the first two minutes is not intrusive; it is the question that tells both people which language to use, and answering it plainly is the cooperative move.
The learner who is permanently polite
Here is the stall, and it comes in two versions that mirror each other. The textbook learner produces the polite ending with everybody, for years. It is never ungrammatical, so nothing corrects it, and what it communicates is that this is not a friendship. The other version arrives through television and music: a learner absorbs casual speech, uses it with a shopkeeper or somebody older, and the effect is not neutral either.
Both are invisible to the person doing it and entirely visible to everybody else, and neither will be mentioned, because mentioning it would itself be rude. The exit is the same in both directions: listen to which form the other person uses and match it, and if a friendship has clearly formed and nobody has offered, ask. Asking is normal, it has a set phrase, and it is a great deal less awkward than a year of unnecessary distance. Getting somebody to tell you when the moment has arrived is exactly what a paid hour can be used for, in what a teacher is worth, and what you can do alone.
Two ways to get it wrong
Too formal against too casual, and what each one costs
The pans are level in frequency and not in consequence, which is the argument for defaulting upward while you are unsure.
- Too formalThe textbook learner's version, and the recoverable one
- You sound distant to a friend
- It reads as reserved rather than rude
- It quietly prevents the relationship from closing
- Fixed in one conversation, once noticed
- Too casualThe version that arrives through television and music
- With a stranger, a shopkeeper, or anybody older
- It reads as a hand on the shoulder
- Noticed immediately by everybody present
- Not mentioned, because mentioning it would be rude
Neither error is ever mentioned to you
The asymmetry is the practical content. Both errors are silent, and only one of them is easy to recover from, which is why the polite level is the right default for a learner who cannot yet read the situation.
Two ways to watch the switch happen
Korean variety programmes are unusually good material for this, because hierarchy and age are foregrounded rather than incidental: participants state their ages, negotiate what to call each other, and the register shifts on screen. It replaced the textbook dialogue, which is written in one register throughout for teaching reasons and therefore never shows the thing this page is about. Free wherever you already watch, and the exercise is to pause when somebody changes form and work out what changed in the room.
The other is an arrangement with a tutor rather than a product: agree at the start that the first half of each lesson is polite and the second half is casual, and switch on the clock. It replaced practising one register for a year and meeting the other in the wild. It costs nothing extra, it makes both forms automatic instead of one, and it removes the specific fear that stops learners switching, which is that they will get it wrong in front of somebody who matters.
The mistake: treating the levels as degrees of politeness
Formal, polite and casual are not more and less of one thing, and a learner who ranks them on a single line will reach for the formal ending when they want to be respectful to a friend's grandmother. That is not extra respect; it is the register of an announcement, and using it in a living room is strange rather than deferential.
Each level belongs to a kind of situation rather than to a quantity of politeness. The formal one belongs to public speech. The polite one is the default between adults who are not close. The casual one belongs to a relationship that has been established. Learning them as three settings for three situations is a smaller job than learning them as a scale, and it produces fewer of the errors that a Korean speaker will notice and not mention.
What the endings are attached to
The speech level sits in the same syllables as the tense and the sentence type, at the end of every clause, which is particles, and endings that change with who you address. Raising the person you are talking about is a separate axis again, marked by its own morpheme earlier in the verb. Those endings change shape as they meet the stem, which is sounds that shift depending on their neighbours. The vocabulary you put inside them also carries register of its own, in native Korean, Sino Korean, and when each is used. And none of it is legible on the page until the blocks are automatic, in fourteen consonants, ten vowels, assembled into blocks.