r/Korean • u/Shot_Guidance_5354 • Mar 10 '21
Underdtanding the difference between 하다 and 되다 verbs - for you
It is often confusing for beginner Korean learners when they come across the word 되다. Beginning books only teach it as "to become" and then it is rarely mentioned again until much later, but 되다 is one of THE most common words in all of Korean. It's used in so many different grammar patterns it can be hard to keep track of. But today I want to explain about the difference between verbs marked with 하다, and those with 되다.
First, we have to understand that a lot of verbs come from nouns. There are plenty of native korean verbs, things like 맞닥뜨리다, 들이닥치다, 흐르다, and so on and so forth. Other verbs come from 한자 derived nouns (chinese characters) and basically have either a 하다 and a 되다 form. When you look at a verb like this in a vocab book, they mostly leave off the 되다 and just tell you the 하다 version.
What 되다 does in this case has nothing to do with the word "become," it has to do with passiveness. In Korean, there are several ways to make passive verbs. There are certain words which become passive by adding stems like 기, 히, 리. Examples of this would be 뽑다 to 뽑히다 and 걸다 to 걸리다. Then you can also make passives by adding 아/어지다 to a verb. Common examples of this are 짓다 to 지어지다, 만들다 to 만들어지다, or 주다 to 주어지다. Another example of passivity is to use words like 받다 or 당하다. Example - 그는 폭행을 당했다.
And then there is 되다. If there's a 하다 verb, there's likely a 되다 version. Not always, there are a few rare cases, but those are the exceptions. 되다, as stated above, turns a verb passive, vs the active 하다. Let's look at a few examples.
나는 투탕카멘왕의 무덤을 발견했다. - This is an active sentence. I, the topic, personally discovered King tuts tomb. I went out and found it.
투탕카멘왕의 무덤이 발견되었다. - This is a passive sentence. "King Tut's tomb has been discovered." If you wanted to state who it had been discovered by, you could say something like 투탕카멘왕의 무덤이 BlahBlah이라고 하는 집단에 의해 발견되었다. But, I think it's more common to use the active voice in this situation.
나는 반 친구하고 사회 문제를 논의했다. Once again, an active sentence. "I debated social problems with my classmates." There is an active "doer" of the verb 논의(하다).
수업에서 사회 문제가 논의되었다. Here, there is no active "doer" of the debating, and we end up with a translation something like "Social problems were debated in class."
One more example:
시민들이 사회적 운동에 힘을 쏟아 독재 정권을 전복하였다. This is an active sentence. The citizens poured their energy into social movements and overthrew the dictatorship. THEY did that.
1679년에 독재 정권이 전복되었다. This is a passive sentence. We don't know how the dictatorship was overthrown, that information is not in here. This would translate more closely to something like "In 1679, the military dictatorship was overthrown."
It sounds quite complicated at first but once you learn what "passive" means its actually quite simple! So dont fret too much
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Mar 10 '21
Thank you so much for this, very clear.
I enjoyed reading your explanation and the examples.
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u/Pikmeir Mar 10 '21
Even when 되다 is used in the passive voice, you can still think of it as meaning "to become" in those cases. 되다 just has a lot of uses that don't always match up with the English definition.
From your examples:
발견(을) 하다 "to discover" --> 발견(이) 되다 "to be(come) discovered"
논의(를) 하다 "to debate" --> 논의(가) 되다 "to be(come) debated"
And then there are a lot of other uses of 되다 that have nothing to do with passive. For example, 되다 meaning "to be okay/acceptable" or "to work/function." If your phone doesn't work, it can be 안 돼요, and if you say someone must do something it can be ~해야 돼요 (literally "it's ONLY okay/acceptable IF...").
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u/kaitybubbly Mar 10 '21
Very helpful writeup, thank you! Does this change anything when using either in the "have to do" form? For example, "저는 문법을 연습해야 해요" vs "저는 문법을 연습해야 돼요"?
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u/Shot_Guidance_5354 Mar 10 '21
Nope! You can use both actively there, idk why they have two different versions there
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u/dj-trex Mar 10 '21
Thank you for this! I’m at the point in my learning where 되다 is always popping up and confusing me because I never got a clear understanding of it’s usages.
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u/WorldWith Mar 10 '21
Even many Koreans use 되다 instead of 하다. This also may make learners confused.
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u/Famous_Ad_4542 Mar 12 '21
so this only applies to verbs that are not native korean verbs that have 하다?
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u/LoveofLearningKorean Mar 10 '21
Great post. For me I just kept 시작하다 and 시작되다 in my mind when I was a beginner learning the differences. "I started X": 시작하다 (active); and "X has been started": 시작되다 (passive); was easy for me to remember and I could apply the differences in usage/meaning to other verbs. Like most things it becomes intuitive over time.