-고있다, -고계시다, -을래요
These past two weeks, we learned how to describe what someone is in the progress of doing- essentially the equivalent of adding -ing to words in English. As South Korea is a hierarchical society, we learned the different structures of how to say what my friend (same age is doing) versus what a grandpa is doing (older age). For people our age, we would say _____ -고있다, while we would say ______-고계시다. The activity would be in the blank.
We also learned how to conjugate the words to fit properly in the blanks. It is interesting because I have noticed that there are always exceptions in every language. There is a universal rule to conjugating these words, but there are exceptions for when there is a special rule that needs to be followed. I noticed this trend also exists in other languages I have studied, such as English and Spanish.
We also learned how to ask people to do an activity, using the ending -을래요? We would attach the conjugated word in the beginning of the word and attach this ending to the end. It is interesting because, to my knowledge, this would only be used for people our age. For people who are older than us, we would not use a question but more of a statement- question. It is a question but it is said as a request that does not end in a question mark. In this way, it is more polite and indirect.
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