Lesson 28: Anomalies with ~

Vocabulary
Nouns:
= adult
= child
= princess
= influence*
= some sort of writing
= literature
= district/local area
= neighbor
= environment
= farm
= parts/sections
= advertisement
= basketball
= volleyball
= nature
= character/personality
= earth
= fart*
= head
Verbs:
() = research
= concentrate
= divide (verb)
= use
() = registration (register)
= carry something on your shoulder
= become familiar with/be close with
= to stand up/line up/erect
= move
() = arrangement (arrange)
= cancel
= protect/defend
= to miss (a train/buss/opportunity)
Adjectives:
= few*
= strong
= uncomfortable

 = enough
= sleepy
= true (true feelings)/frank
= exact
Adverbs and Other words:
= eventually
= throughout (a month/year)
= abroad/overseas
= caution
= finally/at last
= times (these times, our times, etc..)
= itself/its own*
= only/just*
= direction
= slightly/a little bit
= thoroughly
Words With *
For help memorizing these words, try using our Memrise tool.

Irregulars with ~
Present Tense
In Lesson 7 you learned all about Korean irregulars. In that Lesson, I wrote:
As with all languages, there are some irregular conjugations that you need to know. The
irregulars apply at times when you add // (or another vowel/consonant) to a
verb/adjective stem(aside from conjugating, you have yet to learn other times when you
must add a vowel to a word. You will learn about these later).
Irregulars can act differently depending on what vowel/consonant you are adding to them. Up to
now, you have learned a lot about adding ~/ to verbs/adjectives and how irregulars change
as a result of this addition. For example:
+ / =
+ / =
But, adding ~ to these words doesnt change them:
+ ~ =
+ ~ =
However, the irregular does come into play when adding ~ in the present tense. The
irregular from lesson 7 says:
If the final vowel of a stem ends in AND you add ~/~ to that stem, the is removed and
the / get added on directly to the stem. However, if you are adding or something
starting with to the stem the is removed and ~/~ is added directly after the stem.

In this case, we are adding ~ () to the stem of words. Therefore, if we add ~~ to words
ending in , the must be removed:

= opening a door
Which can be put into a sentence as a noun:
= I saw my friend opening the door
Spotting this irregular in text is usually obvious, but even to this day I get confused when I see the
irregular in use. Sometimes, I will see something like and I think to myself huh?
is not a word? But then I realize that it is actually + .
.

Past and Future Tense

Three irregulars come into play when adding the past/future tense of ~ (/ and /
).

Irregular: From lesson 7:

If the last letter of a word stem ends in (for example: = to make/build), the gets
removed when adding a vowel.
Its a little bit confusing in this case, because you are adding / or /.
Lets stick to the past tense for now (/), and well get to the future tense later.
Lets look at two words: and .
(to forget) ends in a consonant (). This means that you must add to it:

There is no irregular, so is perfect.
(to build) ends in a consonant (). This means that you must add to it:
.
But, this is incorrect. Remember the irregular. Because you are adding a vowel () to the stem
of , you must remove the :

This looks incorrect, but it is in fact correct. It looks incorrect because, now that the is
gone, people think we should change ~ to ~. This is not done, and instead, ~ is added after
the stem as described above and as shown in the examples below:
?= Who is the person that built that house?

The same process occurs in the future tense:

+ / =
= I will build a house (remember here that the future tense conjugation of ~
is actually just ~ + )

Irregular: From Lesson 7:

If the last letter of a word stem ends in (for example: = to walk), the gets changed to
when adding a vowel.
The confusion involved with this implementation is similar to the confusion involved with the
irregular. Lets look at the verb (to walk) as an example:
ends in a consonant (). This means that you must add ~ to it:
.
But, this is incorrect. Remember the irregular. Because you are adding a vowel () to the stem
of , the must be changed to :

The same process occurs in the future tense:

= That person was the first person who
walked from Seoul to Busan

Irregular: From Lesson 7:

When you add ~/ to a stem of a word that ends in , you actually drop the /
altogether:
Lets look at an example again.
(to forget) ends in a consonant (). This means that you must add ~ to it:

There is no irregular, so is perfect.
(to sell) ends in a consonant (). This means that you must add ~ to it:
.
But, this is incorrect. Remember the irregular. Pronouncing is weird, and flows more
naturally if you just say :

= He is the person who will open the doors

Im not sure when you would say that sentence, but its difficult to think up of a sentence where

I can apply this irregular and make it sound natural. This irregular is often applied when
conjugating to the future tense by adding / to the end of a sentence:
= I will sell apples at the market tomorrow

My Favorite Thing:
This is one of the first sentences that people learn whenever they learn any language. In Korean
however, the grammar within this sentence is a little bit difficult (you only just learned it), so that is
why you are just learning about it now.
In Korean, they dont have a word for favorite. Instead, they just use to like most
. You have known how to make these sentences for a long time:
= I like our school
= I like our school most
But you havent yet learned how to specifically say My favorite ____ is
Lets look at adjectives first. These should all be easy to you:
= the biggest thing
= the smallest thing
= the most difficult thing
However, in those sentences, only adjectives are describing the noun. Now that you have learned
how to describe nouns with verbs, you can now say:
= the thing that I like most (which is also my favorite thing)
Notice that it is not . Really, you are not saying my favorite thing you are
saying the thing that I like most. So even though in English we say my, in Korean you shouldnt
use / in place of / in these sentences.
You could take out to simply mean the thing that I like
= the thing that I like
Or change the subject:
= The thing that my friend likes most
Now that you have created the noun of the thing that I like most you can place it in sentences:
= My favorite thing is food
= Food is my favorite thing

You can also replace with any other noun:

= My favorite food is kimchi
= My favorite day is Friday
As I said before, people often dont realize the power of the ~ principle. Now that you can
you can describe nouns with verbs, you can say much more complicated (and natural)
sentences. Look at the following example:
= My favorite thing is movies
Is that natural? It would probably sound more natural if you were to say my favorite thing is
watching movies or making movies. You learned in Lesson 26how to make those nouns:
= watching movies
= making movies
= My favorite thing is watching movies
The easiest mistake to make in that sentence is (incorrectly) not changing the latter part of the
sentence to a noun. Many learners of Korean would just say the following:

But that just translates to My favorite thing watches movies. You need to say My favorite
thing is watching movies which requires you to change the second clause of the sentence to a
noun and then add (is).
= My friend is a teacher
= My favorite thing is watching movies
heh, complicated. Thats why I waited until this lesson to teach it to you.
If you specifically want to say that your favorite thing about X is Y you need to use another
grammatical principle. By attaching ~ to a noun in a sentence, you can indicate that
your favorite thing about that particular thing is something. For example:
= My favorite thing about Korea is Korean food
Not only can you do that, but now that you have learned about the ~ principle, you can
create more complex nouns throughout the sentence. For example, instead of saying the
sentence above, you could say:
= My favorite part about living in Korea
is Korean food
= My favorite part
about living in Korea is eating Korean food every day

Words that seem like verbs but are adjectives

There are a few words that seem a lot like verbs but are actually adjectives. In fact, I have taught
these to you before. When you first learned about inLesson 5 I told you that in this sentence:

 = I have a pen
is actually an adjective (which is why the object markers (/) cant be added to them).
Also, when using to form a present progressive (I am ____ing):
= I am eating
is an adjective

Also, when you learned about ~ in Lesson 17, I told you that is an adjective.
When I told you that these words are adjectives, I also told you that this pretty much means
nothing to you right now, but there will be some times when you will need to know that these
words are adjectives. Well, now you need to know.
Lets look at ~ first.
is an adjective, so you must treat it as any other adjective when describing a noun. This
means that if you want to describe nouns in the present tense using you must add ~/:
= beautiful person
= smart person
= the person (who/that) I want to meet
Examples:
?= Do you want something to eat? (literally do you have something that
you want to eat?)
= The person who I want to meet most is
When you want to use to describe nouns in the past tense, you also must treat it as an
adjective by adding or to it:
= That was what I wanted to say

Dealing with is a little bit more complicated when describing nouns.

As I said earlier, is an adjective when using it in these two ways:


You know, that when using adjectives to describe nouns in the present tense, you should add /
to the stem of the adjective:

 = beautiful person
= smart person
= the person (who/that) I want to meet
Grammatically it should be correct to do this to as well:
= the pen that I have
= The thing I am eating
But these are incorrect. For whatever reason, when using to describe a noun in the present
tense (even though it is an adjective) you must treat it as a verb. Which means that instead of
adding ~/ to it you must add ~ :
= the pen I have
= The thing I am eating
There are only a few times in all of the grammar in Korean when using would be correct.
One of which is when you add / to verb stems to say after I . as you learned
in Lesson 24.
Anyways, what is weird is that if you want to use to describe nouns in thepast tense, you
must treat it as an adjective. This means that if you want to describe a noun with in the past
tense you can attach / to it:
= All the people there died

All that is kind of weird, Ill say it one more time step by step:

Adjectives can describe nouns. You know this. You can add ~ / to the stem of an
adjective to describe a noun: . Just like you learned inLesson 3.
You can also use verbs to describe nouns: like you learned inLesson 25.
is an adjective, which means you have to add ~/ to it to describe a noun:

is also an adjective, but when using to describe a noun in the present tense,

you must treat it as a verb ( ). However, when describing a noun in the past
tense, you should treat as an adjective ( ).

Using (and other smaller words) in ~ sentences

One thing that I want to mention before this lesson ends is how to include words like ///
in sentences. Its hard to describe what I mean without examples (its not really a
concept so I better show you some examples.)

In English, we could say:

The person who I met. Translated into Korean would be easy:
However, in English, we could also say something like that person I met. Almost the same
meaning, but not exactly the same. If you were to translate that directly, it would come out like
this:

But in Korean, they always place those small words that can go before nouns (////)
immediately before nouns. So, instead of saying:
you should say:

Its hard to translate some of these sentences into Korean. Look at next example. You will
probably be able to understand it completely, but translating it to English is very difficult:

It would translate to something like my movie that the teacher watched but that sounds a little bit
unnatural in English. When these sentences come up, you should realize that the noun being
described ( movie) is being described by two different things:
= my movie, and
= the movie that the teacher watched
Even though it is unnatural to say the full sentence in English (my movie that the teacher
watched), you should be able to understand the meaning without needing to translate it directly.
Really, learning about the ~ principle is the most confusing part about Korean grammar.
After conquering it, there isnt much more to be all that confused about (the difficulty later on
doesnt come from confusion it just comes from the pain of memorization, haha). There
are still 2 or 3 more lessons where we will be talking about ~ . Stay tuned, because they will
be coming right after this.