Part of the Korean Whodunit grammar series · Korean reviewed by native speakers
When you repeat what someone else said, Korean marks it with ~다고 하다. It quietly labels information as secondhand — something you were told, not something you witnessed. And a suspect who insists they only “heard” a thing is making a claim you can test.
Take a plain sentence, attach ~다고, and add 하다 (“to say”) — or 했어요 for the past. The result means “X said that…”. The ending shifts with the sentence type, but ~다고 하다 is the workhorse for statements.
(Someone) said it’s raining. — 온다 (plain) + ~다고 했어요.
He said he was at home. — reporting someone else’s claim.
The point of ~다고 하다 is distance: you are not saying it is true, you are saying someone told you.
Reported speech is how a person hands responsibility for information to someone else. 들었어요 (“I heard”) and ~다고 했어요 (“they said”) both signal: don’t blame me, I’m only relaying it.
A suspect who says 관장님이 회사를 판다고 들었어요 (“I heard the director was selling the company”) is claiming secondhand knowledge — someone told them. But if no one else knew, there was no one to hear it from. Reported speech with no possible source points straight back at the speaker: they didn’t hear it. They knew it.
The pattern changes by sentence type: statements use ~다고, questions use ~냐고, commands use ~라고. 오라고 했어요 = “(they) told me to come”; 언제 오냐고 했어요 = “(they) asked when I’d come.”
(They) told me to come quickly. — ~라고 for a reported command.
In an investigation, the most important word is often “said.” Whoever a suspect quotes is their alibi for knowing — and a quote with no speaker is a confession.
In Korean Whodunit, a suspect’s “I only heard it” can collapse the moment you ask who told them. Read the statements and trace every quote back to its source. Free, no sign-up.
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