We use 미안해요 to people we are not familiar with, and with people who are older than us and in more senior position than us. When you accidentally bump into people, when you step on someone’s foot accidentally, and when you knock over someone’s coffee, you can say 미안해요. The polite form is what you will use the most in everyday life. Generally, the formal form is not commonly used in everyday speech. We use the formal form 미안합니다 in very formal situations, such as when you’re apologizing to senior people at your workplace, or when you’re apologizing to much older members of the family. 미안하다 is the base form, so we can conjugate this verb into three levels of formality. However, in general, the context makes it obvious that it’s the speaker that’s apologizing, so we can just use the verb 미안하다. If we’re saying sorry on someone else’s behalf, then we need to say who we’re saying sorry for.
When we say ‘I’m sorry’ in Korean, we don’t use the pronoun ‘I’. 미안하다 is a verb that means ‘to be sorry’, and this is made up of the noun 미안 (mi-an) which means ‘sorry’ and the verb 하다 (ha-da), which means ‘to do’. Sorry in English is an adjective, so to say ‘sorry’, we use the verb ‘to be’ and say ‘I am sorry’. Nevertheless, there are a number of different ways of saying sorry in Korean, and in this article, we’ll guide you through all the different ways of saying ‘sorry’ in Korean so that you can say ‘sorry’ appropriately in every situation. Fortunately, ‘sorry’ in Korean isn’t as multi-functional.
The most common way is to apologize for something we have done, but we also say sorry to express sympathy, disappointment, and also to politely ask someone to repeat what they have said. We use the word ‘sorry’ in so many different ways in English.
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