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Honorific Polite and Deferential Polite Quiz Posted by Ginny on Jan 19, 2010
Try this quiz and see how many you get right! Conjugate the following into the present honorific polite: 1 – 듣다 (to hear, to listen) 2 – 살다 (to live) 3 – 어렵다 (to be difficult) 4 – 나쁘다 (to be bad) Conjugate the following in the past tense of the honorific polite: 5 – 있다 (to have)…
Deferential Polite Past Tense Posted by Ginny on Dec 10, 2009
What happens when you have an 이다 copula ending in the deferential polite past tense? Let’s say there’s a sentence like this, “학생이었습니다“. (학생 = student. 이였습니다 = deferential polite past of 이다.) In English this would mean, “I was a student”. Now with a phrase like this, “학교였습니다“, it would mean “It was a…
Question and Answer Sentences in the Standard and Deferential Polite Form Posted by Ginny on Oct 19, 2009
When you want to form a statement in the standar polite form, you stick 요 at the end of the sentence. For example, 이분 보라 씨예요. (이분 = this person. 보라 = Bora. 씨 = Ms. 예요 = copula ‘is’ in the standard polite form) would mean ‘This person is Ms. Bora’. Moreover, if I…
Honorific Deferential Posted by Ginny on Dec 28, 2009
In the last post we looked over the honorific polite and the honorific polite in the past tense. In today’s post we’ll take a look at the honorific deferential and the honorific deferential in the past tense. With a 하다 ending verb like 사랑하다 (to love), the honorific deferential would be 사랑하십니다 and 사랑하십니까 in…
Politeness Levels Posted by Ginny on Feb 4, 2009
A lot of people ask me, what is the difference between the standard polite form and the deferential polite form in Korean? The answer to that is that the deferential polite form uses a higher level of politeness than the standard polite form. While both the standard and the deferential forms are polite, you would…
The Progressive Posted by Ginny on Apr 29, 2010
In English, the present progressive is expressed by adding -ing. In Korean, the gerund is expressed by the construction ~고 있다. 변호사들이 서류를 준비하고 있어요 = The lawyers are preparing the documents (변호사 = lawyer. 들 = plural marker. 이 = subject marker. 서류 = document. 를 = object marker. 준비하고 있어요 = preparing) The…
ㅎ Ending Words Posted by Ginny on Apr 2, 2010
A lot of color words have the ㅎ ending. For example, 빨갛다 (red) falls in this category. There are other words that are not color words that have a ㅎ ending. 그렇다 (to be in that way, to be like that) is another example In the standard polite present tense form 그렇다 will be 그래요. Drop…