Formal Politeness!

[sarahk]

Hi!
I appreciated the one podcast that focused on the more formal politeness speech...but then I have noticed that the latest ones are not only more casual, but more focused on children...

I don't mind the more basic podcasts...but could you also include the formal way of saying the words?

Like in the recent post about what do you want?... I'm about 1000% sure I could never say 먹거 레 (i'm sure my spelling is wrong...!) to most people I speak to in Korean...

When I was just in Korea, I rode in the front passenger seat of the CEO's car...when the driver responded to the CEO, he was SO Formal. He didn't say "아니오"..he said "아님니다" (again, i'm not 100% sure of my spelling!)

I was impressed and even with his limited English, I tried to get as much info from him as possible because that is how formal I need to learn to speak!

So, instead of REPLACING the podcasts, maybe, in the informal language of the podcasts, there can be a quick review of the more formal way of speaking...

Thanks!

(I tell all my friends about KoreanClass101.com!)

[javiskefka]

The lesson notes provide a conversion to standard politeness level. For formal politeness level the sentence endings are systematic, and you can see some examples for various verbs at the Grammar Bank. The sentence endings for the copula, propositive, interrogative, imperative are also different. There are a lot of more subtle things, though. For example, the "What do you want to eat?" is "무엇을 드실래요". The two changes are fully pronouncing 무엇 instead of contracting it, and replacing 먹다 with the honorific word 드시다.

[Keith]

Hey Sarah!

Thanks for posting your request. That's great insight! And as javis mentioned, we do include the formal transcripts in the PDF, but we are also thinking of getting all our older lessons and recording the more polite versions of the dialogs as well.

We're definitely planning this for our future Intermediate lessons, and it will take some time to backlog our older lessons. But this is definitely something we intend to do!

[sarahk]

I know that you include the formal transcripts in the PDFs, but I do much better when I hear the formal language rather than read it.

I'm really trying to learn how to construct sentences so it helps to hear the informal AND the formal in the same lesson.

Thanks!!

[steved]

Perhaps we could have a formal dialog with the informal dialog.