한국어하고 중국어를 배우는 미국인. 2013년 8월부터 서울에서 거주함. 공부 같이 하자~American learning Korean and Chinese. Living in Seoul since 8.2013. New posts go up at 10am KST on Wednesdays and Saturdays! Let's study together~
Time for another grammar post! I was just looking through the Grammar Directory and was surprised to find that I hadn’t yet written about this very useful form. Doubting that there’s no way your best friend forgot your birthday? Don’t believe that the quiet nerdy kid in your social anthropology course moonlights as a stand-up comedian? -(으)ㄹ 리가 없다/만무하다 is just what you’re looking for!
Function
The function of this form is to express disbelief of something, or to express that you think there is no possibility of something being true. For example, we can use it in these situations:
There’s no way such a famous restaurant would suddenly shut down.
There’s no way he would have failed if he had really studied that hard.
Usage
Before getting into how to use this, I want to break the form down a little, as you can see there are three distinct parts to it. The first is our future noun modifier ending, which you can read about more here. The second part, 리, is what is known as a 의존명사, or dependent noun. You will never see this noun in isolation, but used here it refers to the “reason” or “logic” for something. Slap 없다 or 만무하다 on the end, and you are saying that there’s no reason why something will happen or would have happened.
The difference between using 없다 and 만무하다 at the end of this form is negligible. 만무하다 is a word derived from Hanja (일만 ten thousand 만 萬, 없을 not existent 무 無) that means “to be completely none.”없다 is far more commonly used in daily speech while 만무하다 is pretty solidly relegated to the realm of more formal speech.
To use this grammar form, attach -을 리가 없다/만무하다 to descriptive or action verb stems that end with consonants and -ㄹ 리가 없다/만무하다 to stems that end with ㄹ or vowels. Be careful of any irregular conjugations!
This form can be used with past tense verbs as well as present tense; just be sure to put the verb in past tense and then attach -을 리가 없다/만무하다. Let’s check out some examples!
Usage examples
그렇게 유명한 식당이 갑자기 문을 닫을 리가 없어요. (There’s no way such a famous restaurant would suddenly shut down.)
실제로 공부를 그렇게까지 열심히 한 거였으면은 시험에 떨어질 리가 없었을 거예요. (There’s no way he would have failed if he had really studied that hard.)
둘이 사이가 정말 안 좋잖아. 승규 씨는 새린 씨를 도와줬을 리가 없어. (Those two really don’t get along [Lit. Their relationship is really bad], you know. There’s no way Seunggyu would have helped Saerin.
김 의원께서는 뇌물을 받으셨을 리가 만무하다고 봅니다. (We believe there is no reason why Senator Kim would have taken bribes.)
Bonus: Can we use 있다 with this form?
We know that 있다 is essentially the opposite of 있다. Can 있다 be used in this form as well as “-(으)ㄹ 리가 있다”?
The answer is both yes and no! -(으)ㄹ 리가 있다 does not lend itself to declarative sentences, but it can work in questions. For example, one could ask:
그렇게 유명한 식당이 갑자기 문을 닫을 리가 있겠어요? (Is there any reason why such a famous restaurant would suddenly shut down?)
지민 씨가 면접에 빠졌을 리가 있어요? (Is there any reason why Jimin would have missed the interview?)
I have updated my Hanja Anki deck yet again, now including all 7급 characters! You might notice that I’m going from version 2 to version 4, but I did have a version 3! I just didn’t post it on here, though it did make its way to a Discord server. In the end, it’s a good thing that I didn’t post version 3 widely because that version, which is the same character set as the current version, had an error in it that I only found when I was doing my Anki reviews with the deck. So, I fixed the erroneous card up and re-exported the set to make my (hopefully error-free) version 4.
For some reason I can’t get an in-text link to work, so just copy and paste this into your brower: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lLhd4xa1lnZFFwDEopP-jU_5raaIkT3e/view
It's been a while since my last grammar post, hasn't it? I was going through my grammar directory and realized I had not yet written anything about this easy-to-use and super useful form!
Maybe you're comparing prices of two similar objects at the store, or maybe you're disagreeing with a friend which recent blockbuster was the best. In either case, you can use -보다 to indicate that one thing is more or less (adjective) than something else.
Function
As already stated, we use -보다 to make comparisons. For example, in English we might say something like:
This cell phone is more expensive than that one.
This movie is less exciting than that one.
Junho is smarter than Dani.
All of these are covered by -보다!
Usage
To form a sentence with -보다, you would use the basic format "Y는 X보다 (descriptive verb/adjective)" to mean "Y is more (adjective) than X." Note that this basic format only works when you want to say that something is more (adjective) than something else. If you want to specify "less than," you need to use the adverb "덜," which means "less."
이 핸드폰은 저것보다 비싸요. (This cell phone is more expensive than that one.)
이 영화는 그 영화보다 덜 재미있어요. (This movie is less exciting than that one.)
준호는 다니보다 더 똑똑해요. (Junho is smarter than Dani)
--> Note: Just like we have "덜" to indicate "less," we also have "더" to indicate "more"! -보다 on its own automatically indicates "more than," but you can emphasize it a little by adding "더" after -보다.
We can also expand a little bit on the basic format and be more descriptive with our comparisons by using other grammatical structures that we know.
승현 씨는 엘리 씨보다 공부를 잘하지 못해요. (Seunghyun is worse at studying than Ellie.)
이 회사는 전에 일하던 회사보다 월급이 더 높아요. (The salary at this company is higher than the salary at the company I worked at before.)
--> Note that 더 is separated from -보다 here. A general rule of adverbs in Korean is to try to place them as close as you can to the verbs they modify.
보다 at the start of a sentence??
Sometimes you will see 보다 at the start of the sentence. In this case, it's similar to -보다 in the sense that they both indicate a comparison. However, 보다 at the start of a sentence (or somewhere not attached to a noun as previously shown) is an adverb that indicates something is more (insert descriptor here) than anticipated. For example:
A: 주혁 씨는 정말 묵묵하네요. (Juhyeok is pretty quiet.)
B: 좀 친해지면 보다 말이 많은데요. (If you become close with him, he talks more than you might think.)
As you can see, Juhyeok is not really being compared to some external thing. Rather, the comparison is expectation vs. reality.
Hello again, everyone! I’m slowly making progress digitizing my Hanja cards into an Anki deck. Today I have ver.2 of the set for you, which includes 8급 just like the last set, and 7급II. I also edited the image for one of the 8급 cards because, when reviewing, I realized that I had written it incorrectly! Oops!
Anyway, here’s the set! Just click here, download the set, and import it into Anki
Each of the levels is individually tagged in the overall deck, so if you just want to isolate one of the levels, you should be able to do so fairly easily.
If you want more information about the fields on the cards, you can read the first flashcard post here.
Please do tell me if you find any errors on any of the cards so I can update the set ASAP.
Hello everyone! I've been keeping up with my Korean and Mandarin study, and generally keeping busy in this last month of the year.
As the title of this post suggests, I have some flashcards for you all! I am slowly digitizing my paper hanja cards into an Anki deck, and I want to share it with you guys. So far, I have only added my 8급 cards to the deck.
The current deck can be found by clicking this sentence!
I imagine that it will take quite a while to finish digitizing my complete sets. Here are all of the hanja cards I have made so far:
As you can see... I have a lot of cards! When I completely add a new level (next one is 7급II, of course) I will share the deck again.
Now a little info about the cards:
Each card has four fields, two of which are hidden until you click to open them. The main fields are the front field, which has the 훈음 (character meaning and reading); and the back field, which has a photo of the paper card I made. I marked stroke order when I wrote the cards, so there's that!
The first of the two special fields is "Extra Information", which has info about what level the character is in both reading and writing, and the radical. This field can be revealed by clicking a link on the front side. The second special field is "Sample words", which shows words that use that character written out in hanja only. This can be accessed from the back side of the card.
Each card has a normal and reverse, so there are 100 cards in the current deck to represent the 50 8급 hanja.
I hope some of you find this useful! Please let me know if you do :)
Just wanted to let y’all know that a Korean grammar post is in the works! I haven’t forgotten about my absolute love Korean even in the midst of my Chinese-studying fervor! I’ve got a lot coming up so it might take a minute, but it’s in the works >.>
I'm on a roll with this speaking challenge! This is day 13's recording. I only recorded it today, even though I wrote it yesterday. I still can't really talk about the topics without scripting them first, but I'm noticing that it just gets easier and easier to write my scripts. It also gets easier to read them out loud once they're written! Anyway, this is my story about the first time I went to a hospital in Korea. Transcripts in traditional and simplified Mandarin follow!
Back on the 30-day speaking challenge! Today's set topic was actually something else, but I wanted to talk about something that happened at work today. I like teaching, but sometimes kids are just too unreasonable!
Transcripts in traditional and simplified Mandarin are after the Read More!
Today's topic was talking about customer service. My throat is not in the best condition these days, but I still made it happen today! Transcripts in traditional and simplified Mandarin after the Read More~
Idk if youre aware but lingodeer said that they will remain free in the short-term but become a fully paid service in the long run. I’ll probably pay if they continue to provide the high quality service but it does make me sad to see it stop being free.
Yes, I’m aware! It’s unfortunate because I know that not everyone who could really make good use of it will be able to afford it, but at the same time, I believe in pay people for their work, and good resources don’t just come from thin air (this is the same reason why you won’t ever see me reblog those posts with links to pdfs of textbooks and all. Not judging anyone who uses them because I certainly have made use of not-quite-legally-obtained resources myself before!). I’m not sure if I’ll pay to keep it or not once the beta ends, but I think I will even if I don’t continue using the app just to support them.
Today is day 6 of the speaking challenge, and the topic is talking about why we're learning the languages we're learning. So, here's me talking about why I'm learning Chinese! As always, transcripts in traditional and simplified Mandarin can be found below!
Here's my recording for day 4 of the speaking challenge that I'm participating in recently (even though today is day five... oops!). I skipped day 3 because the topic, which was talking about weekend plans, wasn't very interesting, and because I was busy painting something nice for my Nana's birthday. That's neither here nor there, though!
This time, I talked a bit about a show I binge-watched lately. As always, transcripts in traditional and simplified Mandarin are below the Read More!
Here’s day 2 of my November speaking challenge! This time, I talked a bit about the city I live in currently, as well as the city I used to live in. Transcripts in both traditional and simplified characters can be found after the Read More link!
Happy Saturday, everyone! I was invited to beta test the new (more) advanced LingoDeer Korean levels. Of course I jumped at the opportunity! LingoDeer has in the past been my top recommendation for language learning apps*, and I have to admit that I was excited when news of the new levels dropped. Past experience has given me high expectations for the new levels.
I did the first four levels—titled "Impolite Form 1," "Impolite Form 2," "Will," and "Suggestion" before taking the next two tests to jump to higher levels. I took notes on my experience based on a variety of things. As this is a beta test, I of course took notes of any bugs that I found (and reported them through the app as I encountered them). Still, even the smoothest language app is useless if its information is no good, so I also made notes about the presentation and utility of the material. I'll take you through each level and the two tests so you can "experience" them in the proper order.
*Past LingoDeer reviews: Korean, Japanese, Japanese (exit), Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin Chinese (revisited)
Impolite Form 1
Notes:
Each level in Lingodeer has a "Notes" section that precedes the actual gamified learning panels. The notes explain the grammar and relevant cultural things related to the material that will be taught in the upcoming lesson. In this section, I found that the notes were quite thorough and, blessedly, they explained that despite labeling 해체 as the "impolite" form, they do not mean to say it is actually impolite. If you are aware of how low-key angsty it makes me when someone says X form =polite and Y form=impolite, you will understand why I'm so happy about this (hint: politeness is relative to the situation!). Also, they included some small pronunciation notes on the loss of 애/에 distinction in Seoul dialect, which I found to be a nice touch.
One fault I did find in the notes—one that I have found in past reviews—is that they are peppered with little grammatical errors. Not enough to obscure the meaning of what they are trying to say, but enough that I wonder why a few simple edits were not made to clean it up a bit.
In-course:
The good and bad things that I found in the "Impolite Form 1" learning levels all apply to every other learning level.
In the learning levels, the audio files were on point, though I did not expect anything less since LingoDeer has had (imo) the cleanest audio files of any language app since it first dropped last year. There is even an option to record your own voice when you listen to new audio examples so you can play back and compare your speaking with the example. I'm still waiting for the day that they implement pronunciation-check questions like HelloChinese did, though!
Another thing I liked in the in-course sections is that, when doing sentence building with syllable tiles (if you do not choose to just manually input all of the Hangul yourself), they now have blank tiles representing spaces. This is a huge improvement to just clicking on a bunch of syllables and getting a long string of smashed-together words. Still, spacing in examples and answer displays still could be improved. Particles are still spaced away from the elements that they attach to, and the difference in spacing between attaching element+particle vs. individual elements that would typically be spaced is not large enough to be easily noticeable. I would recommend either spacing regularly spaced elements even farther apart, or better yet, spacing things normally and just coloring particles and other attaching things like the copula 이다 to show that, while they are attached to something else, they are still distinct things.
Another thing I would like to see is more variety in the sentences that you are asked to work with. Seeing an example sentence and then immediately being asked to plug in a missing part of the exact same sentence makes it feel like you see the same sentence too many times, and you could ultimately just memorize the answer instead of having to actually apply knowledge to respond properly. I think that throwing in more sentences using previously learned vocabulary would be nice. I will note that the feeling of seeing the same sentence over and over lessened as I moved through the sections, as it seemed more "unexpected" sentences were getting mixed in gradually. Still, doing that from the very beginning would be great.
Impolite Form 2
Notes:
The biggest bone I had to pick in this notes section is that it claimed that 해체 is always formed by dropping 요 from the "polite" form or 해요체, when that does not in fact always work (ex: honorific -(으)시-). This is clarified in a notes section in a later tile... but still, even though they cleared it up later, I think they should not have made such a blanket statement in the first place, especially since they had already introduced 해요체 sentences with the honorific infix. Someone who has learned those forms but is not yet familiar with -세요 becoming -셔 in해체 could very easily get into a habit of writing sentences like (X) 바쁘세 instead of (O) 바쁘셔.
In-course:
"Impolite Forms 2" is where I made the most bug reports. The previous learning section was very usable, but this one was a bit of a mess still. There were a lot of missing images, and audio would not play. This was especially a problem if you wanted to hear the new example sentences read out, and on listening questions (just had to guess the answers for those!). I trust the team will fix those bugs soon.
Concerning the actual material itself, I was more or less content except with the huge amount of particle-dropping that they jumped into. While dropping particles in Korean is very natural in speech (and especially in 해체), it feels like they went straight from using all of the particles to using literally none in some sentences. There was no mention of this natural particle-dropping in the notes, and I think that it is something that learners should be made properly aware of.
"Will" and "Suggestion"
Notes:
I liked that the information in the notes for these sections was explained in a clear and easy-to-understand way, same as for the other sections.
In-course:
The issues with audio and image loading were gone, and the smooth user experience returned! I just had a minor bone to pick, that being how they translated "심심하다" to "boring" when "bored" would be more accurate. Solid levels overall!
Tests 1 and 2
I wanted to check out some test levels because they could give me an overview of material in the levels yet to come. I was pleasantly surprised: In those first two tests, which cover 16 sections, there was a lot of useful stuff including -기 위하다, the difference between 데려오다/가다 and 가져오다/가다, obligation with -아/어야 되다/하다, reasons with -기 때문이다, honorific particles and verbs, noun modifier endings, and more. All of it is really solid material, and that plus a skim over the titles for lessons further down (up?) the tree have me convinced that there is a lot of solid intermediate information in this new release.
Verdict:
The LingoDeer Korean 2 beta is full of solid information! Only in one level did I run into any serious bugginess, and the rest of my experience was smooth, with some nice changes and additions from what I expected based on my past experience with LingoDeer. Other than bugs, the things that bugged (har har) me the most were issues with how they space particles and such in example and answer display sentences, and the lack of explanation for some things I felt really needed explanation. Overall, LingoDeer remains at the top of my recommended language apps list, and I look forward to giving the Japanese and Chinese betas test runs as well (when I have the time!).
Hello, everyone! Tonight, I celebrate the revival of my site with my first recording for the 30-Day Speaking Challenge. For the next thirty days (or at least 15 out of those 30; I think realistically I will not be able to do all of the days), I will try to tackle a variety of topics in Mandarin. My reading and writing is alright, but my speaking... yikes!
Anyway, here's Day 1: Self Introduction. If you follow the Read More/Continue Reading link, you can see a transcript in both traditional and simplified Mandarin.
Hello, everyone! Sorry I've been away for so long! I could bore you all with the many reasons my hiatus went on for so long, but I don't think you'd appreciate it much (and it would be boring for me to write out as well). The important thing to know is that I'm back! Here's a little rundown of some things I have upcoming for you all:
Coming soon
LingoDeer Korean beta test: I was invited to beta the new, more advanced levels. I'll get into it and get started on a review as soon as the update drops (should be soon!). For those of you who don't know, LingoDeer is a language-learning app that started with courses in Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese and is now branching out into other languages. My initial experience with the Korean course , my experiences starting and completing the Japanese course, and my brief dabble into the Chinese course at the request of the developing team were largely positive, and I'm very glad that the team is asking for my input again!
30-Day Speaking Challenge posts: I have decided to participate in the Huggins International 30-Day Speaking Challenge! This is a challenge in which you try, for every day of a month, to speak on a certain topic in the language you are trying to learn. I am focusing on Mandarin because, while my reading and writing are decent-ish, my speaking is not that great. I'm working on it, though—I found a Chinese language meetup in my area, and the others there are absolute GOALS FOR DAYS—and I thought that pushing myself to do this challenge would really help me! I will post MP3 files of my recording for the day, as well as a transcript, here on my site. I might not hit every single day, but I want to try to get at least 15/30 complete.
What about the Korean posts??
I am mostly focusing on Mandarin these days. That said! Korean is a huge part of my daily life, and I will keep on studying that as well. Once I get back into the groove, I will try to put out more grammar posts and article translations. Korean is my number 1 language love <3
Thank you all for being so patient. As always, happy studying!
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