👨🏻‍🏫What Is a Topic Marker?🤔

Let's dive into the world of particles in Korean🤪

안녕! Hi, there!👋🏻

I hope all is well with you and thank you very much for following my posts and learning Korean with me! I forgot to schedule this lesson to be sent out last night so you are getting it late today. My bad🙏🏻!

Let’s get right into this!

Introduction to the topic marker

Today, we are going to take a look at something that might look very unfamiliar to you. It is, however, an important grammatical element in Korean that is used so frequently that we need to learn and get used to it from the early stages of our learning journey. I have to admit—this isn’t something that can be taught in just one 5 minute weekly lesson. In order to fully comprehend the concept of this grammar element, you are going to need an extensive experience in reading, writing, listening and, speaking Korean. So, I’m going to keep coming back to this topic in the upcoming lessons so we can slowly pick up this small and subtle nuances the topic marker creates!

Fun fact: we’ve already seen the topic marker in the previous lesson where we learned how to introduce ourselves in Korean. Let me bring back the examples from that lesson:

• “Hello! I am Sean.”

  • 안녕하세요! 저는 션이에요. [an-nyeong-a-se-yo! jeo-neun shyeon-i-e-yo]

• “My friend is a nurse.”

  • 제 친구는 간호사예요. [je chin-gu-neun ga-no-sa-e-yo]

In that lesson, we learned the verb “to be” where we add 이에요 [i-e-yo] after a consonant ending word and 예요 [e-yo] after a vowel ending word at the end of the sentence. But if you take a look at the subject of each sentence, we see a common syllable attached at the end, 는.

• “Hello! I am Sean.”

  • 안녕하세요! 저는 션이에요.

• “My friend is a nurse.”

  • 제 친구는 간호사예요.

Fun fact: did you know Jackie Chan used to live in Korea working as a stunt double from 18 to 20 years old?

Let’s take a look at the first sentence, “저는 션이에요”. 저 means “I” or “me”, 션 is Sean, my name, written in Korean and 이에요 is the conjugated verb, “am” in this case. In the second example, “제 친구는 간호사예요”, 제 means “my”, 친구 means “friend”, 간호사 means “nurse” and 예요[e-yo] is the conjugated verb, “is”. Now, you might have noticed I haven’t defined 는. That’s because on its own, it’s not really translatable into English. In Korean, however, it’s a syllable that conveys information from speakers to listeners in an efficient way. (More on this in upcoming lessons.)

So what does 는 (AKA the Topic Marker) do then🤔?

The purpose of the topic marker, as the name suggests, is literally marking the topic of the sentence! So, you can think of it as “as for…” which sets the topic right at the beginning of the sentence. Let’s take look at the above examples again.

• “I am Sean.”

  • 저는 션이에요 ➝ As for me, I am Sean

The topic marker 는 is setting 저 or “I” as the topic of the sentence.

• “My friend is a nurse.”

  • 제 친구는 간호사예요. ➝ As for my friend, he or she is a nurse.

The topic marker 는 is, again, setting 제 친구 or “my friend” as the topic of the sentence.

Therefore, you are supposed to add the topic marker when you want to set a specific topic which usually happens at the beginning of a conversation. And the important thing to keep in mind is that once the topic is set and the conversation remains within the same topic, you don’t need to repeat the topic marker in every sentence after the first one. As a matter of fact, not only is the topic marker is omitted, but the subject itself is usually omitted altogether.

Let’s take a look at the following example:

• ➊ 저는 션이에요. ➋ 한국 사람이에요.

  • ➊ I am Sean. ➋ I am Korean. (A side note: if you want to say a person from a country, you would say the country name in Korean, then add the word 사람 [sa-ram] which means a person.)

As you can see, the first sentence starts with a subject 저, but it’s not present in the second one. It’s because the topic which is “I” was set in the first sentence and the topic remained the same in the second sentence, so it was unnecessary to repeat both the subject as well as the topic marker. Now, you probably want to ask me, “Then… when would I add the topic marker again?”

Well… you would have to add the topic marker again when the topic changes!

• ➊ 저는 션이에요. ➋ 한국 사람이에요. ➌ 이 사람은 제 친구예요.

  • ➊ I am Sean. ➋ I am Korean. ➌ This person is my friend.

In the third sentence, we see another topic marker added at the end of the subject 이 사람 which means “this person”. Therefore, by adding a topic marker again, we can see that there has been a transition of the topic from “I” to “this person”. But, we see that the topic marker used in the third sentence is 은, not 는 which is what we’ve seen until now. As you might have already guessed, depending on the final letter of the subject, you will have two different options for the topic marker:

• 은: a topic marker that comes after a consonant ending word

  • e.g. 선생님은, 학생은, 형은, 한국은

  • 선생님: teacher, 학생: student, 형: older brother of a brother, 한국: Korea

• 는: a topic marker that comes after a vowel ending word

  • e.g. 저는, 제 친구는, 오빠는, 멕시코는

  • 저: I or me, 제: my, 친구: friend, 오빠: older brother of a sister, 멕시코: Mexico

Does this make sense? I hope so and as always feel free to ask me any questions you have in the comments.

Now, let me give you a short composition and let’s analyze it together.

“오늘은 영화 봐요. 그리고 와인 마셔요. 내일은 운동해요. 그리고 쉬어요.”

오늘: today, 영화: movie, 보다: to see or to watch, 그리고: and, 와인: wine, 마시다: to drink, 내일: tomorrow, 운동하다: to exercise, 쉬다: to rest

I’m sure you understand what I wrote with the meanings of the vocabulary provided. But can you see how the topic marker was used in this composition? What kind of topics are present? Is there a topic change happening?

We see the topic marker 은 after the subject 오늘 which means “today”. So, we are setting “today” as the topic in the first sentence—it’s not present in the second sentence because drinking wine is still happening today after watching a movie. Then, we see another topic marker at the end of the subject in the third sentence. Here, a topic change is happening from “today” to “tomorrow” which is 내일 in Korean. And the same thing is happening in the last sentence where both activities, exercising and resting, are going to take place sometime tomorrow.

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That’s it for today!

I would like to give you a little homework. Try and write a 4-sentence composition just like the example above. There should be:

1. Two topics, so there can be a a topic change

2. Two sentences with the topic marker and the other two without

Thank you very much for always engaging yourself in my lessons🙏🏻!

Have a great Sunday!

담에 또 봐!💙

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