Sales pitch¶

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

• Korean's elegant type system (품사) allows modular grammatical system with clear separation of concerns.
  • Verbs, adjectives, and "to be" (이다) form a single class of predicates, with conjugate similarly. These conjugations are highly modular and easily composed; many fixed patterns are the composition of smaller atomic rules.
  • Nouns change only by adding postpositions to the end.
  • Adverbs do not inflect at all.
  • No subject-verb agreement dependencies. The declension of nouns and inflection of verbs are largely independent.
  • Finally, there's a standard transformation procedure for changing a word between different parts 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 just "사랑해", 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.