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These are notes I wrote to myself when trying to learn Korean grammar. I think it's more of a hey-look-at-some-cool-linguistics blog. It should not be used as an actual textbook.

Sales pitch

Coming from English, the most surprising parts of Korean grammar for me have been:

  • Korean has an elegant type system (품사).
    • Adverbs do not inflect at all.
    • Nouns change only by adding postpositions to the end.
    • Verbs, adjectives, and "to be" (이다) form a single predicate class, conjugated using a single extensive system. These conjugations are highly modular and easily composed; many fixed patterns are the composition of smaller atomic rules.
    • The categories have a clear separation of concerns (e.g., no subject-verb agreement dependencies).
    • Finally, there's a standard transformation procedure for changing a word between different parst of speech.
  • Korean has a topic marker 은/는 that lets you set the topic of a sentence (not necessarily the grammatical subject).
  • Korean is concise and often omits pronouns altogether. ("I love you" is translated as just "사랑해요", for "love".)

Every sentence must end with a verb, and Korean requires that verb to conjugate according to a speech level to reflect the formality of the situation.

Overview

These notes are roughly organized as follows:

  • First Principles covers the bare minimum necessary to form sentences such as "I saw a cat", "I am a cat", or "the cat is cute".
  • Verb Basics covers the most common things you can do with a verb. This includes negation, passive voice, tense, and a tiny bit of joining two verbs together ("I eat and sleep").
  • Postpositions covers various particles you can add to nouns (and later noun phrases), such as plural particles, possessive particles, and words like "to", "from", "at", etc.
  • Casting is about transforming words or entire sentences between parts of speech.
    • As a simple example, you can turn "cry" into "crying" to make a sentence like "crying babies are annoying".
    • As a more complex example, in the sentence like "The girl I met in Korea is smart", the entire clause "The girl I met" is a noun.
  • Joining is about joining two sentences together, such as in "I think, therefore I am".
  • Endings lets you put finishing touches on the final verb in a sentence, so you can turn a declaration into a question, an imperative, a suggestion, etc.