๐จ๐ปโ๐ซWhat Is a Topic Marker?๐ค
Let's dive into the world of particles in Korean๐คช
์๋ ! Hi, there!๐๐ป
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 bad๐๐ป!
Letโs 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 admitโthis isnโt 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, Iโm 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: weโve 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:
โHello! I am Sean.โ
์๋ ํ์ธ์! ์ ๋ ์ ์ด์์. [an-nyeong-a-se-yo! jeo-neun shyeon-i-e-yo]
โMy friend is a nurse.โ
์ ์น๊ตฌ๋ ๊ฐํธ์ฌ์์. [je chin-gu-neun ga-no-sa-e-yo]
In that lesson, we learned the verb โto beโ where we add ์ด์์ [i-e-yo] after a consonant ending word and ์์ [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, ๋.
โHello! I am Sean.โ
์๋ ํ์ธ์! ์ ๋ ์ ์ด์์.
โMy friend is a nurse.โ
์ ์น๊ตฌ๋ ๊ฐํธ์ฌ์์.
Letโs take a look at the first sentence, โ์ ๋ ์ ์ด์์โ. ์ means โIโ or โmeโ, ์ is Sean, my name, written in Korean and ์ด์์ is the conjugated verb, โamโ in this case. In the second example, โ์ ์น๊ตฌ๋ ๊ฐํธ์ฌ์์โ, ์ means โmyโ, ์น๊ตฌ means โfriendโ, ๊ฐํธ์ฌ means โnurseโ and ์์[e-yo] is the conjugated verb, โisโ. Now, you might have noticed I havenโt defined ๋. Thatโs because on its own, itโs not really translatable into English. In Korean, however, itโs a syllable that conveys information from speakers to listeners in an efficient way. (More on this in upcoming lessons.)
So what does ๋ (AKA the Topic Marker) do then๐ค?
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 โas forโฆโ which sets the topic right at the beginning of the sentence. Letโs take look at the above examples again.
โI am Sean.โ
์ ๋ ์ ์ด์์ โ As for me, I am Sean
The topic marker ๋ is setting ์ or โIโ as the topic of the sentence.
โMy friend is a nurse.โ
์ ์น๊ตฌ๋ ๊ฐํธ์ฌ์์. โ As for my friend, he or she is a nurse.
The topic marker ๋ is, again, setting ์ ์น๊ตฌ or โmy friendโ 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 donโt need to repeat the topic marker in every sentence after the first one. As a matter of fact, not only isย the topic marker is omitted, but the subject itself is usually omitted altogether.
Letโs take a look at the following example:
โ ์ ๋ ์ ์ด์์. โ ํ๊ตญ ์ฌ๋์ด์์.
โ I am Sean. โ 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 ์ฌ๋ [sa-ram] which means a person.)
As you can see, the first sentence starts with a subject ์ , but itโs not present in the second one. Itโs because the topic which is โIโ 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, โThenโฆ when would I add the topic marker again?โ
Wellโฆ you would have to add the topic marker again when the topic changes!
โ ์ ๋ ์ ์ด์์. โ ํ๊ตญ ์ฌ๋์ด์์. โ ์ด ์ฌ๋์ ์ ์น๊ตฌ์์.
โ I am Sean. โ I am Korean. โ This person is my friend.
In the third sentence, we see another topic marker added at the end of the subject ์ด ์ฌ๋ which means โthis personโ. Therefore, by adding a topic marker again, we can see that there has been a transition of the topic from โIโ to โthis personโ. But, we see that the topic marker used in the third sentence is ์, not ๋ which is what weโve 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:
์: a topic marker that comes after a consonant ending word
e.g. ์ ์๋์, ํ์์, ํ์, ํ๊ตญ์
์ ์๋: teacher, ํ์: student, ํ: older brother of a brother, ํ๊ตญ: Korea
๋: a topic marker that comes after a vowel ending word
e.g. ์ ๋, ์ ์น๊ตฌ๋, ์ค๋น ๋, ๋ฉ์์ฝ๋
์ : I or me, ์ : my, ์น๊ตฌ: friend, ์ค๋น : older brother of a sister, ๋ฉ์์ฝ: 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 letโs analyze it together.
โ์ค๋์ ์ํ ๋ด์. ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ ์์ธ ๋ง์ ์. ๋ด์ผ์ ์ด๋ํด์. ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ ์ฌ์ด์.โ
์ค๋: today, ์ํ: movie, ๋ณด๋ค: to see or to watch, ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ : and, ์์ธ: wine, ๋ง์๋ค: to drink, ๋ด์ผ: tomorrow, ์ด๋ํ๋ค: to exercise, ์ฌ๋ค: to rest
Iโm 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 ์ after the subject ์ค๋ which means โtodayโ. So, we are setting โtodayโ as the topic in the first sentenceโitโs 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 โtodayโ to โtomorrowโ which is ๋ด์ผ 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.
Thatโs 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:
Two topics, so there can be a a topic change
Two sentences with the topic marker and the other two without
Thank you very much for always engaging yourself in my lessons๐๐ป!
Have a great Sunday!
๋ด์ ๋ ๋ด!๐
If you need to learn the Korean alphabet and how to read Korean, consider purchasing my e-book here: Korean e-book: Read and Write Hangul in a Day
์ ์ ๋ ์ ๋ ฑ ํ ์ธ ์. ์ ์ฆ ๋ฐ ์ ์ ์ผ?
1. ์ด ์ ๋ ํ ๊ทน ์ ์ ๊ฐ ๋จน ์ ์ด ์.
2. ๋ก ๋ณถ ์ด ๋ง ์ ์ด ์.
3. ์ ์น ๊ตฌ ๋ค ์ ํฌ ๋ฃจ ์ฆ ๋ฅผ ํ ์ ์.
4. ์น ๊ตฌ ์ ์ง ๊ณผ ๊ฐ ๋ฅผ ๋ ๋ณธ ์ด ์.
๋ด ์ ๋ ๋ด ๐๐ผ
์๋ ํ์ธ์ ์ ์๋....
์ค๋์ ๋๋ฌด ๋ฐฐ๊ณ ํ์ ๋ผ๋ฉด ๋จน์ด์. ๋ด์ผ์ ์น๊ตฌ๋ค์ด๋ ๋ง๋ ๊ฑฐ์์. ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ ์ํ๋ฅผ ํจ๊ป ๋ณผ๊ฑฐ์์.
Let me know ์ ์๋ is it correct or not...plz