Learn Korean , Learn 한굴 by Hwal-wal

#Unit_Lesson 33: Korean Position Words / Prepositions

Korean Position Words

First of all, what are prepositions? Well, they are those little words that serve as links between words or describe relationships based on time or space that seemingly have as many rules as exceptions. Prepositions as we are used to in English don’t translate all that well to Korean and words like ‘through’ can have many different translations.

So to make it easier, we can group similar words together and in this lesson we will concentrate on the words that describe position (under, over, inside, outside etc.)

To mark a position or location in Korean, you use the 에 particle ( which also has other usages). This particle works well in conjunction with these position words and is usually memorized together. You can separate the particle from the words if you want but I wouldn’t recommend doing so. It won’t do any harm, but on the flipside, learning them together might help fluency.

English Korean

Over / On 위에

Under 밑에 / 아래에

Next to 옆에

Between 사이에

Inside 안에

Outside 밖에

In front 앞에

Behind 뒤에

Opposite side 건너편에 / 맞은편에 / 반대편에

Nearby 근처에

Practical use of position words

To make more use of these words, we can pair them up with a noun, like ‘school.’ So if we wanted to say ‘in front of school’ we would say:

학교 앞에 = in front of school.

But let’s try to make a little longer sentence than that:

공책이 책상 위에 있어요. = The note book is on top of the desk.

To ask where someone or something is, you use the question word 어디 meaning ‘where.’ :

어디에 있어요? = Where is it? Where are you?

So to ask where the school is, we would say:

학교가 어디에 있어요? = Where is the school?

To answer, we could say:

병원 옆에 있어요 = It’s in front of the hospital.

Different particle for actions

While grammar is not the focus on this lesson, note that, if you are describing where an action (playing, eating, meeting etc.) takes place and not where something is located, you need to switch particles from 에 to 에서. For example:

학교 앞에 -> 학교 앞에서

And of course a full sentence.

학교 앞에서 만날 거예요 = I will meet them in front of the school.

source courtesy of: Kimchi cloud ^^