In the last weeks, my language partner used the variety show of my favorite k-pop groups as my listening material. Since I am at a higher level of listening, daily conversation from textbooks will be too easy for me. People in such variety shows speak much faster than what I have learned before. Also, Korean words are homophonic, so it is actually a great challenge for me to watch such a variety show without subtitles. In order to make sure I fully understand the sentence, sometimes I need to stop the video and keep replaying that sentence several times. If that sentence contains some words that I do not know, I will try to write down the words first and then open the subtitle to check the spelling and the actual meaning. After these classes, I realize that vocabulary is really important. Words are basic units that constitute a sentence. Each word in a sentence has different functions. Based on its grammatical function, each word is categorized into different classes, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on. Korean has the following word classes. 1 Noun 2 Pronouns 3 Particles (that attach to a noun and indicate grammatical relationships or add special meanings) 4 Numbers and counters 5 Verbs (that indicate action or progress) 6 Adjectives (that indicate state or quality) 7 Copula (that indicate an equational expression: 이다 “be” and 아니다 “be not”) 8 Adverbs 9 Pronouns (that appear before a noun, like English demonstratives such as this, that, these, and those)
These Korean words, in general, fall into two categories: inflected words and uninflected words. Inflection refers to the process of adding some kinds of affixes to the original word to indicate grammatical features such as tense, number, aspect, and person. The addition of the affixes changes the original word's shape in the process; however, it does not change its form class. For instance, in English, the word “go” becomes “goes” with the affix “-es” when it is used for a third person singular.
Another example is when the verb “study” changes its form to “studied” with the affix “-ed.” The process of adding such affixes refers to inflection. Notice that these inflected verbs end up having additional grammatical features (e.g., the third person verb usage and past tense), but their class does not change (e.g., they are still verbs).In Korean, the category of words that undergoes inflection includes verbs and adjectives. On the other hand, the category of words that do not undergo inflection includes nouns, pronouns, numbers, adverbs, and pronouns. All of these different classes of words will be discussed in detail throughout this book. However, this unit focuses on nouns. Nouns, in general, refer to the part of speech that indicates a name of the thing, quality, place, person, or action. Nouns often serve as the subject and/or object of verbs and/or adjectives.
Replies