매튜의 한국어 연습 블로그

Update: part two of my thoughts on this one. part one.

I get flustered trying to do the whole sequencing thing in Korean. Like all good students, I learned the "후에" grammar point first. As a means of learning more accurate ways to express order, I am introduced to ~고 나서. When A is finished B will happen (or did happen). Instead of saying "퇴근시간 후에 청국장을 먹었어요" one should say "퇴근하고 나서 청국장을 먹었어요". "~고 나서" does not express tense. Whether A and B already happened or they will happen, either way, the connector stays the same. The tense is reflected in the last verb. It's similar to ~고 but 고 does not imply order.

Examples:

밥을 먹고나서 수업을 다닐거예요
After I eat, I'm going to go to class.

형을 전화하고나서 낮잠을 잤어요
After I called my friend, I took a nap

보통 아침 7시에 일어나고서 식사를 해요.
Normally, after I wake up, I eat breakfast.

친구들랑 식사하고 나서 노래방에 갔어요
After I ate with some friends, we went to a 노래방.

It's not a hard grammar point to learn but it doesn't always sound right. The problem is in translating directly from English to Korean. For example, I want to say "After teaching, I'll check" so I think to myself "가르치고나서 확인할게요". Although it seems it would be fine, this is really not very natural to say at all. Unfortunately, the grammar point brought up in this post does not fully apply here, either. Instead, ~면 is more commonly used. Obviously the direct translation of 수업끝나면 확인할게요 is "If class ends, I'll check" the implication is more like "when" instead if "if". But don't we already have a "when" clause?

Confused? Join the club.

Another short but sweet one. This one is something I've been searching for. I have a tendency to use "전에" and "후에" a lot in spoken Korean. However, it's more of a written expression. Using "후에" to express what will happen later isn't the worst thing one can do but it certainly isn't very native sounding. Therefore, the language nerd student rejoiced when I found this. I hope I can adopt it and similar expressions natively.

~고 나서, as you might have guessed, is used when one event has just finished and another is coming. But, how does this differ from vanilla "고" and "아/어서"? Seems we need a brief summary before going on:

(고)
오늘 친구가 만나고 영화 봤어요.
Today I met my friend and I saw a movie (but the friend didn't come with me).
The two events are not related. Both are in the past, though. Sequential order not implied (maybe I met my friend first or maybe I saw a movie first. Doesn't matter because we didn't see the movie together. It's just a recollection of stuff that happened today)

(아/어서)
오늘 친구가 만나서 영화 봤어요.
Today I met my friend and we saw a movie together.
The two events are related in sequential order. First I met my friend, and then we saw a movie.

The "~고 나서" grammar point is similar but has a vital difference. In this case, the first event (A) is already finished before the second event (B) will take place. The book I'm using gives a great example:

스티브는 저녁을 먹고 나서 도서관에 가서 공부를 해요.
After Steve eats dinner, he goes to the library to study.

Let's take a look at some other examples:
A: 언제 숙제 했어요? when did you do your homework?
B: 점심 먹고 나서 했어요. I did it after lunch, jerky.

A: 샤워 하고 나서 여친한테 전화 할 거야 After I take a shower, I'll call my girlfriend

Actually, I'm not super confident with the last grammar point. someone correct me.