Due to my bad throat condition, I was unable to participate much verbally during our second Korean Class, but I have still learnt a lot about the basic grammatical structure of Korean, and different colors in Korean.
The Korean Language in speaking can be very different when spoken formally or informally. “이다 is attached to the end of a noun to make the noun function like a verb.” For example 반짝means glitter, but when attached with 반짝이다, it becomes a verb. And in many circumstances “이다” acts as “is/are” or “am,” giving the same qualification to A and B. For Example: I (나는) am(이다) Chinese(중국사람), 나는 중국사람 이다. “입니다”, on the other hand, is used to politely speak to the listener.
One sentence that we have spent a long time analyzing was “여기가 우리 집입니다. This is my house.” Olivia asked this very interesting question as why in most of our sentences that we have learnt in our self-introduction, we have used “은” or “는” after the noun, but in this case 가 is used as the particle. “가”, used at 여기가, usually means when you are pointing at something (an object). On the other hand 은has a more wide range of usage. It is a particle that is used with a noun to denote the topic or theme of a sentence. When the noun ends in a consonant, use “-은”. When the noun ends in a vowel, use “-는”. Brenda further assisted us and pushed us to create sentences on our own to practice using 은 and 는interchangeably during a sentence. And we even went a further step to learn another property of these two particles 은and 는 as “expressive comparisons,” such as “동생은 키가 큽니다. 저는 키가 직 습니다.My sister is tall. I am short.”
While we were trying to form comparison sentences, we brought the conversation to colors. We spent the rest of the class period learning the vocabularies of the different colors of the rainbow, while identifying the impact of globalization on Korea, as most of the name of the colors are referred to in a word that has a similar English Pronunciation. For Instance, though the word for Red in Korean is 빨강색, but is now commonly referred to as 레드 which is pronounced as “Re- deu.”
For the upcoming week, we hope to continue our lessons in the basic connecting particles and grammatical structure of sentences in Korean, such as “습니다” vs. “습니까”. I hope to utilize what I have learnt today and practice through reading lyrics of my favorite Korean songs, and try to understand them better.
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