Spoken Korean: Lesson 1
This is my new attempt to write a course of Korean. The only requirement that I ask you is that you know Hangeul. I will try to minimise the use of the grammar jargons, and each lesson will not contain any more than two pages, if you copy and paste this into Microsoft Word, Times New Roman point twelve.
A few brief notes about the structure of the language are required. Korean is called an agglutinating language, that is, they glue little words called the particles to the other words. Learning how the particles work is crucial in understanding how a sentence works and also for you to form the new sentences. Another interesting feature of Korean is that the verbs are conjugated not according to any number or person, but according to the politeness. This can be quite challenging to master, but as a foreigner who learns the language, one can simply stick to one level of politeness that is generally usable and the least offensive. In the first lessons, a single form of the politeness will be used throughout.
When you want to introduce yourself, you need to know the word for “I”, that is “저.” But when you introduce yourself, you’re talking about yourself – that is, you are the topic of the sentence. This “topicality” is not marked in English, but it is in Korean. And this topicality, like other grammatical concepts, is introduced by a particle. We will call it the “topic marker” here, because it marks the topic. The marker is “는.” So far, it gives you a little phrase “저는.”
Still, you haven’t told anything about yourself. A sentence must contain a verb, and the verb for “to be” is “입니다”, pronounced “임니다.” Where would you put the contents? Certainly, you have to be something. And this something must come between the subject and the verb. In Korean, the main verb of the sentence always comes at the end. So, you want to say you are a student – a “학생.” You don’t have to worry about the article “a” because articles don’t exist in Korean. “학생” may mean a student, the student, or just student. How would you say it?
저는 학생입니다. (Pronounced: 저는 학생임니다.)
Now, it’s natural to move on to another personal pronoun, “you.” As mentioned above, politeness is not only cultural but a linguistic part of the Korean language, and it could be offensive to address someone directly using “you.” This is not an uncommon phenomenon, as in tu/vous distinction in French or du/Sie in German illustrates – in order to avoid the directness, they use plural forms in the formal situations. In English, thou was such a casual form which was dropped out of the language and replaced by the plural you. The second person pronoun given here is “당신”, literally means “your body.”
But we need to review our topic marker here. It’s hard to pronounce “당신는” because the two consecutive n’s make it sound unnatural, at least to a Korean speaker. In order to ease the pronunciation, you simply drop the ㄴ in 는. How would you say “you are a student”?
당신은 학생입니다. (Pronounced: 당시는 학생임니다.)
You may notice that in pronunciation that the ㄴ in 당신 gets elided to 은 and still yields you the same 는. 은 is used when the preceding word ends in a consonant.
Let’s turn this into a question. The word 입니다 has three parts, which can be recognised as 입-니-다. The other parts will be explained later on, but here we will focus only on the last one, “다.” This is used to form a declarative sentence, that you declare that you are something. When you ask a question, you’re not declaring something, you are interrogating and hence the interrogative has to be used. The interrogative is –까. Now, how would you ask “are you a student?”
당신은 학생입니까? (Pronounced: 당시는 학생임니까?)
Now, let’s try saying “The student is me.” The topic of your sentence is now “the student.” What would it be in Korean?
학생은 저입니다.
In corollary, “the student is you?”
학생은 당신입니다.
This is the end of the first lesson.