네가 싫어 – How to Say “I Hate You” in Korean

I Hate You in Korean

In this lesson we will take a look at how to say “I hate you” in Korean. While we are big proponents of spreading love, having the vocabulary and knowing one or two phrases to express the opposite is an essential part of mastering any language. On top of that, just like in English, we often use these phrases in a jokingly manner rather than actually saying them to someone you hate. There are a few ways to say this in Korean, and we will introduce the most common ones in this lesson. So let’s start with the first one shall we? To say “I hate you” in Korean, you say:

neega shiro

In Hangul: 네가 싫어

This phrase literally translates to “I dislike you” but can used to say “I hate you” as well. It is pretty much all about how angry you are when you say it. It is informal/casual Korean which means that you should only say it to:

• People younger than you
• (and in this particular case) people you are really angry with.

As stated above, feel free to say this jokingly with your younger friends whenever they tease you. However, you should try your best to avoid using it in any other way! ^^.

If all you want to know is a phrase for how to say “I hate you” in Korean, this is all you need to know and you can stop here. However, make sure you also know how to say “I love you” in Korean. If you are serious about learning Korean, we recommend you to continue reading this article to learn more about the expression.

In a variation of this phrase, you can add the subject, ‘I’, at the beginning of the phrase if you want to. In that case, you would say:

naneun neega shiro

In Hangul: 나는 네가 싫어

Note however that Koreans will usually just omit the subject if it’s redundant (i.e. if it’s obvious that it is “I” that is the one who hates). Furthermore, naneun (나는) can be shortened to nan (난). Also, technically, the subject in this case is “you” where “I” is the topic of the sentence. This is because  the dictionary form of shiro (싫어), silhda (싫다) is actually an adjective. Hence, neega shiro (네가 싫어) would literally translate to something along the lines of “you are disliked” or you are “you are unlikable”.

Another way to say “I hate you” in Korean is:

miwo

In Hangul: 미워

This is translates to “hate” more than shiro (싫어). You can think of the first phrase meaning “I don’t like you” and miwo (미워) meaning “I hate you”, and you can mostly be use them in the same situations.

You can add the suffix yo (요) to the end of these phrases to make them more “polite” and suitable to use with people who are older than you, but if you want to actually insult someone, you should omit it.

What is the difference between 니가 and 네가?

You will often see people writing 니가 instead of 네가. They are pronounced the same way, but 네가 is one of those special words that would normally be pronounced neh-ga, according to the rules of Hangeul. However, in spoken Korean, it is pronounced like 니가 (and also sometimes  neo-ga (너가)).  The reason for this is that the word for I (내가) sounds extremely similar.

So to reiterate: 난 네가 싫어 and 난 니가 싫어 are pronounced the exact same way in spoken Korean. However, 니가 is technically not grammatically correct.

For more common Korean phrases and expressions, please check out our Everyday Korean Archive. If you found this lesson useful, you might want to consider sharing it with your friends or giving it like! If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below and we will do our best to help you out.