Expressing possessive relations
Possession requires two things. The possessor and the possessed. There are two ways to express this.

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There are 19 consonants in Korean. The characters were designed to resemble the shape of the speech organs when the sound is made. The first five letters (ㅁㄴㅅㄱㅇ) are the base of all the other letters and are the five physical shapes.

If you say the letter's sound and pay attention to where your tongue, teeth, lips, and throat are positioned you can see the shapes of the letters.

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Since I'm using my journal as my notebook... I figure I should put up all my notes.  So...

Korean vowels are combinations of three strokes. They were originally modeled after the cosmological philosophy of heaven (a dot which has evolved into a short dash), earth (ㅡ), and man (ㅣ).

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Subject Particles 이/가
The particle 이/가 indicates the attached word is the subject of the sentence, ie. what the predicate is about.

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Click for this lesson's exercise.

Using titles or a name instead of "you"

English has all sorts of pronouns: I, me, my, mine, you, your, yours, he, him, his, she, her, hers, it, its, we, us, our, ours, they, them, their, theirs, *takes a deep breath* and so on...

( Not so much in Korean... )

Click for this lesson's exercise.

Comparing Items

While we use 은/는 to mark topics, we can also use 도.
But... what is the difference?

Both of these markers are used to compare items.
은/는 for things that are different or contrastive.
도 for things that are the same. It's the equivilant of "too" or "also."

김영미는 한국 사람이에요.
마이클 정도 한국 사람이에요.  (same)
샌디 왕은 중국 사람이에요.  (different)

Click for this lesson's exercise.

Korean grammar is quite often similar to Japanese grammar.  The omission of redundant elements is one of these similarities.

In Korean you can completely leave out the subjects when they are obvious.  Not only can you leave out subjects, but any element can be omitted as long as the context makes it clear what you are referring to.  For example, not only can you omit (I) from a sentence, but you can also leave out (you) because most likely you are talking directly to the person and they know you mean them.

( Examples! )


Click for this lesson's exercise.

In English we use Korea to refer to the Korean country but Korean to refer to both the language and the nationality.

( But what about in Korean? )</div></div>