Your first two sentences¶

To throw you into the deep end of the pool to start, here are your two hello world sentences:

Our goal is to understand how you could make this sentence if you had the four dictionary entries above.

Parts of speech (품사)¶

Like 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, just like in English.

Nouns¶

In Korean, nouns (명서) 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 just a moment after I talk about verbs. Later, you'll also meet the topic markers 은/는 which is 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.

That means if I'm being really pedantic, our example sentence could mean

depending on context.

Verbs¶

Of course, Korean has verbs (동사), sometimes called action verb. But in the dictionary, you'll find these are always listed in dictionary form, where the last syllable is always 다. 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 honorifics. I'll talk a bit more about that conjugation at the end here.

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. "Alice sleeps")
• Transitive: accepts a subject and a required object (e.g. "Alice pets cat")
• Ambitransitive: accepts a subject and an optional object (e.g. "Alice ate" and "Alice 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). Like verbs, they are given in a dictionary form that always ends with 다. Just generally speaking:

In Korean, adjectives behave really similarly¹ to verbs.

I feel pretty strongly this is a nice feature² because it unifies a lot of grammar. In English, when you say "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.

Case markers on nouns¶

Korean has case markers. The rule is that, if the word ends with a constant or vowel (respectively):

• For a subject, you attach 이/가.
• For an object, you attach 을/를.

So for example, 고양이 ends with a vowel, so to add a subject marker you write 고양이가. (Actually we really should be using a topic marker rather than a subject marker here, but I'll get to that later.)

Word order¶

Korean is a SOV language. You write the subject first, the object (if any), and finally the verb at the end.

Conjugation of verbs¶

Finally, as I said earlier, every verb must be conjugated from its dictionary form. TODO: explain these

TODO: explain 하다 as a special case

TODO: mention irregulars

Putting it all together¶

TODO