The most common form of this expression is “어디에서 왔어요?” To review when to use each form above, see my lesson on politeness levels.
In addition to the above, there’s also an honorific version of this phrase:
어디 is a question word that means “where”. For a refresher, see my lesson on question words.
에서 is a particle paired with a location (noun) when discussing an action happening at that location.
So, “어디에서” means “from where (did you do an action)“. In this case, the action in question is stated by the verb 오다, meaning to come. “왔어요” is its past tense conjugation, so the literal translation is:
From where did you come from?
In the honorific example above, the verb used is not 오다 but 오시다, which is the honorific version of 오다. To review honorific verbs and their conjugations, see the lesson here.
There are still other ways to ask someone where they’re from! For example, if you want to explicitly use the word “country”, you can say:
From which country did you come from?
”나라” is the word for country. I talk more about 어느 (which) in the lesson on question words.
Want to expand your vocabulary? Practice using this vocabulary list of countries in Korean: