Lesson #5: 이/가 and 을/를, Subject and Object Particles 

I’m back for real now! Oh my goodness. I’m back at home. Where I number of people I share a bathroom drops from five to one. Where I have my own room. Where the water pressure is great and showers are hot immediately. Where staying warm is staying in bed. It’s bliss, I tell you. But anyway, now that I’m back, I’ve got some promises to keep, specifically to you guys. I promised I’d have this up and now here it is. Mambo Lesson #5.

So now you know how to conjugate verbs. Great! But what about the subject? How does that play in?

With the help of my handy dandy textbook, I learned nothing. Apparently, most of what I learned in Korean school was oral, cause there are no explanations in this book, and I quite obviously didn’t take notes. But it gave me a direction to take this lesson and that is the grammar points 이/가 and 을/를.

Alright, so to my knowledge, 을/를 is added to the object, so it’s usually called the object marker. 이/가 is added to the subject, and so is denoted as the subject marker and are usually used for things that are not people. So why two of each? Well, like for verb conjugation, it depends on the presence or absence of a 바침, or if the last character ends in a consonant or not. Let’s break it down:

• 이 - subject marker added when there is a 바침 in the last character.
• 가 - subject marker added when there is no 바침.
• 을 - object marker added when there is a 바침.
• 를 - object marker added when there is no 바침.

That’s… pretty much all there is to it. I mean, I know that’s a little meager, but yeah, that’s all there is to say about these. Even I had to say “Hold up, that cannot be it. There has to be more.” Nope. Well, I mean, in terms of basic usage goes. If you watch a lot of Korean movies or dramas or any sort of dialogue in general, you should have a good ear for these, when they sound right and wrong. Not music though, singers tend to not only butcher the pronunciation of words, but also use, as far as I can tell, shoddy grammar. If you don’t, well there are plenty of places where you can hear what I mean. Alright, so time for examples, I guess. For this lesson, the vocabulary used will be published in a separate post and used here. Here we go.

• I am learning Korean. - 한국어가 배웁니다.
• Please write your name. - 이름을 쓰세요.
• I see the ball. - 공이 잡었어요.
• Sumi is singing a song. - 수미가 노래를 합니다.

Yeah, so the internet assumes you use its lessons as supplementary sources for learning, rather than a primary, so I can only point you to the Delcan Software website (search ” Subject and Object Markers” on the page) which basically says the same thing I have said here. The other source I can point to is the Basic Korean workbook again, chapters 6 and 12. But I don’t recommend it. It tends to overcomplicate the topics and sometimes, it’s just plain wrong. Well, not wrong, just not what I consider right.

Okay, I’m expecting questions about this topic, not only cause I wrote a crappy lesson, but because the information in general was sparse. So don’t be shy.

Ciao.