This month I’ve focused on learning grammar structure and syntax to word towards my goal of creating and interpreting basic sentences in Korean! There are definitely some morphological differences between Korean and English though, so it has taken longer than I anticipated to completely memorize the different grammar rules.
Learning about Korean nouns was a much easier concept for me to grasp since they have similar grammatical rules like in English. For example, to make a noun plural, you add 들[deul] at the end of the word. Just like in English, some words that are plural don’t need 들 added at the end. It’s also interesting that when the number is specified in describing a plural noun, the plural marker 들 is not needed. For example, one student” is “한 학생 [han hakseng]” and “two students” is “두 학생 [du hakseng]” in Korean, and as you can see 들 is not added to the end for two students although students is plural in this case (medium.com). I also realized how easy it is to identify nouns through learning about verbs and adjectives in Korean, as most are just the noun form with different stem endings attached.
So far I have a very basic understanding of verb conjugations in Korean. It was helpful to begin by learning the verb 하다 [hada] which means “to do,” which is interestingly used quite frequently in Korean. In fact, most verbs and adjectives are just nouns attached to the 하다 ending. This tip is very helpful because you can remove the ending to learn the noun version of the verb/adjective. However, not all adjectives have the 하다 ending as the ending stem depends on the form of the adjective. Whenever there is a 다 ending the adjective is in the infinitive form, which is “to be (adj.)” as in to be 크다 which means “to be big.” If you just wanted to translate it as a standalone adjective “big,” then you have to drop the 다 ending and add either ㄴ to the end if the word ends in a vowel, or add 은 to the end if the verb stem ends with a consonant. So to write “big” it would be 크 (verb stem) + ㄴ (ends in vowel) = 크다 “big”. There are different verb endings for irregular Korean verbs, but I will work on learning those once I gain a better understanding of Korean morphology.
Moving forward in my language learning, I will need to learn verb conjugations as there are many different endings for different forms of the word. In terms of syntax, so far I have a basic understanding of Korean sentence structure which is subject-object-verb, which is definitely a change from subject-verb-object in English. Before I can begin forming sentences, I’ll also need to learn the different Korean participles as there are many different ones that are commonly used in everyday sentences in Korean. Over the summer, I plan to continue with my studies since this has been such a fun learning experience, so I will continue to use KoreanClass101.com and read blogs on 90daykorean.com which I found to be extremely helpful in learning about Korean morphology.
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