How morphologic patterns can help you study Korean vocabulary
Use them to your advantage, but wisely.
I’ve been studying Korean for over three years now. Can I consider myself fluent? Absolutely not! However, while learning vocabulary, I’ve found out some patterns surrounding words from the same semantic field.
These do not carry grammatical or syntactic meaning, unlike the many markers that you can find at the end of every element of a sentence, just a lexical meaning. This means that they don’t mark a declension or a grammatical structure, but instead, they mark the core definition of a word, which you can also find in a dictionary.
For this reason, they can be extremely useful when you have to study a huge amount of vocabulary. Moreover, if you just know these, you can already understand part (not all, mind you!) of the meaning of a sentence, which makes everything a little easier.
Which syllable do they occupy?
Usually, it’s the first one, but it really depends on how its derivatives are built. Let’s take two core syllables as an example:
배추, which means “napa cabbage”, has a derivative — 양배추, which indicates just a cabbage. In this case, you have 배추 as the last two syllables, with 양 acting as a modifier.
