KOREAN

49

Vocabulary

Nouns:

매력 = charm

감독관 = supervisor

심장 = heart

미인 = beautiful person

미남 = handsome man

수염 = facial hair

명예 = honor

당구 = billiards

얼룩말 = zebra

탁구 = table tennis

시합 = game/match/competition

인문 = humanities/liberal arts

자격 = qualification

자격증 = certificate

기억력 = memory

먹이 = prey/food

육식 = meat diet

육식동물 = predator/carnivore

교도소 = prison

죄수 = prisoner

여중 = girls middle school

여고 = girls high school

Verbs:

파악하다 = understand/grasp/figure out

살아나다 = revive-person/economy

동반하다 = accompanied with (을/를)

기르다 = growing hair

회복하다 =restore/recover

Adjectives:

편리하다 = convenient/handy

불쾌하다 = unpleasant/nasty

Adverbs and Other Words:

단단히 = solidly

For help memorizing these words, try using our Memrise tool.

Introduction

In this lesson, you will learn how to use ~지만 and ~아/어도, two similar clause connectors that have the meaning of "even though" and "regardless of." You will also learn about adding these endings to 그렇다 to make 그래도 and 그렇지만.

Even though: ~지만

One of the most common words in Korean is "하지만," which means "but." This word (in English and Korean) is usually used at the beginning of a sentence. For example:

저는 먹고 싶어요. 하지만 배고프지 않아요 = I want to eat. But, I am not hungry.

Although those are two perfectly good sentences, there are a lot of syllables that you can eliminate from them. You should be aware by now, that Korean people always want to make their sentences as short as possible. Let's look at how we can do this.

The origin of the word "하지만" (but) probably came from using the stem of 하다 (하) and then simply adding ~지만 to it. I'm not a Korean language history scholar, but that is the way it feels. Regardless of where "하지만" came from, by connecting ~지만 to the stem of any verb or adjective, you can create the meaning of "one does something, but...." This often translates to "even though..." in English. Notice how the following two sentences in English are exactly the same:

Even though I want to eat, I am not hungry.

I want to eat, but I am not hungry.

Essentially, by adding ~지만 to the stem of a word, that clause gets negated, and the opposite is usually described in the latter clause. To look at the example we saw before: