Parts of speech (품사)¶

As in every language, words in Korean are grouped into different parts of speech, which are called 품사. I won't go into all of them right away, but we'll talk about the obvious ones. What happens is that nouns and adverbs behave like in English, but verbs and adjectives are pleasantly different.

Adverbs¶

Korean adverbs (부사) modify verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, or even whole sentences, just like in English. They appear before the words they modify.

Nouns¶

In Korean, nouns (명사) are similar to English. But there are some differences you'll see quickly:

• Korean nouns come with case markers for subject (이/가) and object (을/를). More on that in the next section. Later, you'll also meet the topic markers 은/는 which are even more common than 이/가, but a bit more complicated.
• Korean nouns do NOT need to come with articles like a/an/the.
• Korean nouns do NOT have mandatory pluralization. In English, you must always pick between writing "cat" (for one) or "cats" (more than one). In Korean, the plural distinction is optional; there are ways to force a noun to be plural but these are intentional.

Verbs, adjectives, and 이다¶

Verbs¶

Of course, Korean has verbs (동사), sometimes also called action verbs or process verbs. In the dictionary, you'll find these are always listed in dictionary form, where the last syllable is always -다. Particularly common is the ending -하다, which means "to do".

The dictionary form isn't the one that is actually spoken; all the verbs have to be conjugated before actually being used, and that conjugation system reflects (among other things) formality levels. I'll talk a bit more about that conjugation in the next section.

Like in English, Korean verbs can have different numbers of nouns they act on (in linguistics we call this valency):

• Intransitive: only accepts a single subject (e.g. "Sehee sleeps")
• Transitive: accepts a subject and a required object (e.g. "Sehee loves the cat")
• Ambitransitive: accepts a subject and an optional object (e.g. "Sehee ate" and "Sehee ate tofu" are both legal).

Adjectives¶

In Korean, the dictionary contains entries that should be thought of as "to be soft" instead of just "soft", and those are adjectives (형용사).

In Korean, adjectives behave really similarly¹ to verbs. For example, they also appear in dictionary form ending with -다 or -하다.

I feel pretty strongly this is a nice feature² because it unifies a lot of grammar. In English, when you say "the cat is soft", you need an extra word "is". But in Korean it's really more like "the cat softs".

Worth noting now: in Korean, adjectives are always intransitive.

이다 ("to be")¶

The word "to be" in many languages is in its own special class: the linguistics jargon is copula. Korean indeed treats its copula 이다 as a special case; see its dedication introduction section.

Modifiers¶

A modifier (관형사) is something that goes before a noun and modifies it. I also like the name adnoun for this part of speech (in analogy to "adverb").

A few modifiers are their own dictionary entries, like 이 ("this") and 새 ("new"), but most of the time they're derived from verbs and adjectives. We'll talk about modifiers in a dedicated section.