Slow Days

These past few days have been relatively slow. I am beginning to think that the Korean attitude to language is that it just as a set of unrelated phenomena that all have equal weight and value, and can only be learned individually. Don’t take my tone as critical or negative, it’s probably because I am sick!

The “grammar” points have basically been extensions of meaning in already learned forms. We have already studied the -지 않다-ji anta form which basically negates a verb, and we just recycled it as a question: 예쁘지 않아요?yeppeuji anayo? / she isn’t pretty? as opposed to 예쁘지 않아요yeppeuji anayo / she isn’t pretty. This seems to me to be totally logical and everyone has already been asking questions like this anyway, because it’s easier than inserting other question endings/particles.

Same with -는데-neunde, we recycled it again as -는데요neunde-yo. I shouldn’t complain because we got to practise this extremely flexible and useful ending which I still don’t understand fully. We just learned it as an ending to a sentence rather than as some kind of conjunction. Although I’m not sure what the difference is exactly, it probably is something like: “I don’t like strawberries though”. As opposed to “I don’t like strawberries, though I’m hungry.”

I suppose this kind of thoroughness helps students unfamiliar with grammatical forms and it might also help those who need the writing practice, but couldn’t we just learn something new instead… There’s so much I still have no clue about!