우리 공부합시다
Let's study!

Let’s get into some grammar today for beginners and learn about 받침 or batchim rules! Batchim affects how you pronounce a lot of words and sentences so it is a key thing to learn early on.

받침 Batchim Meaning

받침 is a grammatical feature focused on pronunciation. The word 받침 means to support or prop; and is the bottom character in a Korean syllable (like 받: ㄷ 침: ㅁ).

The word itself is an example of its grammar rule! Each letter romanized comes out to equal badchim but it is actually pronounced more like batchim and so more often you’ll see it romanized as batchim rather than badchim.

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As of just this week South Koreans are now a year or two younger! Now this isn’t literal, if you and your Korean friend were both born in 2000 they are not suddenly younger than you. For the longest time Koreans had a separate age system that added a year to a person’s age. Well not anymore!

For a while now many Koreans and politicians have wanted to put an end to the Korean age system. The president, Yoon Suk-yeol, has said before the current age system has been a drain on resources. And a recent 2022 survey suggested “86% of South Koreans said they would adopt the international system”. So better late than never the change starts now!

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This one will be a quick vocab rundown of appearance in Korean. Key points like height, hair, appearance, weight, disability are all included! With some quick sentences to help you get into the flow and start putting together some yourself.

키 – Height

키가 큰: tall
평균 신장: average height
키가 작은: short
키가 적다: tiny

우리 남동생은 키가 크다: My younger brother is tall

웬디는 키가 너무 작다: Wendy is so short

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Happy pride month! A while ago I mentioned briefly how gay Koreans would use certain terms to refer to a partner/romantic interest and I want to delve deeper into the culture! Both with some points on Korean LGBTQIA+ culture and life, and some great vocab!

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If you’ve learned some words associated with school or education like 학교 you might have noticed the reoccurring 교 theme, that’s because a lot of school and educational words use Sino-Korean!

This one will be a 2-for-1 deal – there are two different Hanja that are pronounced 교 and both used for educational terms:

校: more specific to the school and environment
敎: related to the education process

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I wanted to do a quick post about this while chatting with my boyfriend about AI. We wanted to test and see how well it could translate something so I specifically put the sentence “I’m going to my house to see my brother” into ChatGPT (free ver3, not the latest paid ver4). Not a complex sentence, but it tests 2 things about Korean, and it gave me:

“나는 내 집에 가서 내 동생을 보러 갑니다.”

Which is wrong and awkward. ‘Brother’ is really just a trick though, 동생 doesn’t work if you’re speaking about an older brother, 형 if you’re not male, etc. But the real test was ‘my house’ in a 1 to 1 translation 내 and 집 would mean my house. But for a lot of things Koreans don’t say 내 they say 우리.

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