Every single book about Korean that I have seen so far starts off with the awfully confusing and painfully wrong statement that Korean word order is BLAH BLAH BLAH.
I am not going to do the same thing. So I will come back to word order another time.
Perhaps the biggest difference between Korean and European languages is the way verbs work. In Korean there are 2 distinct kinds of verbs, verbs and descriptive verbs.
Verbs function a lot like (but not exactly like) verbs in European languages. They take a variety of endings and/or particles and generally (not always) describe things that you do or states you are in.
Descriptive Verbs do not exist in European languages. Descriptive verbs describe the nature of something, but they are still verbs. Koreans and most language learners WRONGLY use the term “adjective” to describe them. These are not adjectives!!! THERE ARE NO ADJECTIVES IN KOREAN. If you see them as adjectives, you WILL NEVER LEARN KOREAN PROPERLY. Why do you think Koreans find adjectives in English so difficult? Because they see them as verbs, that’s why they always leave off “is/are” etc. For a Korean “to eat” and “to be hungry” are in the same grammatical category and therefore don’t need a verb (to be).
Got it? One more time. There are no adjectives in Korean.
All verbs have a very simple base form. This base form is used in dictionaries and in the plain style. Basically it's the verb plus -다-da. So in a dictionary you would find 예쁘다ye-ppeu-da / to be pretty - yes this is a descriptive verb or 먹다meog-da / to eat - this is a normal verb
Fundamentally different to European languages are the verb endings. Where most European verbs change to indicate who is speaking, Korean verbs change the most depending on who you are speaking to.
So there are four things to remember while you learn Korean:
- There are two kinds of verbs
- Verbs are about who you are talking to, not who is talking
- There are no adjectives in Korean
- verbs have a base form, ending in -다-da which is mainly used in dictionaries
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