Korean Negation — How to Say No and Not in Korean

Mastering Korean negation — how to say no and not in Korean — is one of the most practical and immediately useful skills you can build as a beginner. Think about how often you use the words “no,” “not,” “I don’t,” or “I can’t” in a single day of English. In Korean, those same ideas are expressed with just two simple patterns, and once you learn them, you can instantly transform dozens of basic sentences into their negative forms. That’s real power from just a few minutes of study.

If you’ve never studied Korean before, don’t worry — this lesson starts completely from zero. You don’t need to know the Korean alphabet, grammar rules, or any vocabulary to follow along. Every Korean word and phrase in this article is written in both Korean script (한글, Hangeul) and in easy English sounds so you can pronounce everything out loud from the very first sentence. The best way to learn a language is to use it, and by the end of this lesson, you’ll be forming real negative sentences in Korean.

Korean negation works differently from English, but in a wonderfully logical way. Where English adds “not” in the middle of a sentence — right after the verb — Korean places its negation word before the verb, or uses a special verb ending that wraps the whole idea of “not doing” into one tidy unit. Two main tools do almost all the heavy lifting: 안 and 못. Let’s take them apart together, step by step.

The Two Kings of Korean Negation: 안 and 못

In Korean, the two most important negation words are 안 (an) [AHN] — “not / don’t” and 못 (mot) [MOHT] — “can’t / unable to.” Think of 안 as your everyday “not” — you choose not to do something. Think of 못 as “can’t” — something stops you from doing it. The difference is just like English: “I don’t eat spicy food” (choice) vs. “I can’t eat spicy food” (inability). Both words sit directly in front of the verb — every single time, no exceptions. This is wonderfully consistent, and it means you only have one rule to remember for placement.

How Korean Negation Fits Into a Sentence (Word Order)

Before you start building negative sentences, you need to know one golden rule about Korean sentence structure: Korean is SOV — Subject, Object, Verb. In English, we say “I eat rice” — Subject (I) → Verb (eat) → Object (rice). In Korean, the verb always moves to the very end: Subject → Object → Verb. So “I eat rice” becomes “I rice eat” in Korean. Now, when you add negation, you simply place 안 or 못 directly in front of that final verb. The formula is clean and logical every time.