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Korean grammar wheels
Grammar Wheels
"I gave my three books to her at the market." — Change any wheels to see how Korean encodes each shift.
Common questions about Korean
What can I toggle on the Korean wheel?
Subject, tense (past, present, future), aspect (simple, -고 있다 progressive, -아/어 버리다 completive), mood (declarative, question, command, propositive), polarity, voice (active, passive), evidentiality (firsthand, -대요 hearsay), focus (neutral, -은/는 topic, cleft), and a four-step register dial. Each spin rebuilds the verb in Hangul with a romanization.
How does the four-level register dial work?
The dial moves through 해체 haeche (casual), 해요체 haeyoche (polite), 합쇼체 hapsyoche (formal), and 드리다 deurida (humble). The verb ending changes at each level, and humble forms also swap the verb itself for a deferential variant.
What is the propositive mood?
Propositive (청유) is a 'let's' form — the speaker proposes a joint action. Switching mood to propositive on the wheel rewrites the verb ending to -자 (casual) or -ㅂ시다 (formal), and the subject is read as first-person plural by default.
What does the focus dial show with -은/는 versus -이/가?
Neutral focus uses -이/가 to mark a plain subject. Topic-fronted attaches -은/는 to the noun (topic) and pushes the rest of the sentence as comment. The cleft setting reframes with -(으)ㄴ 것은 ... -이다, putting the highlighted element in focus position.
Can I use the wheel without reading Hangul?
Each generated sentence shows Hangul, a Revised Romanization, a word-by-word gloss, and an English translation. The same characters reappear under each spin, so Hangul becomes familiar quickly.
Sources for Korean
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Yeon, Jaehoon & Brown, Lucien (2019). Korean: A Comprehensive Grammar, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
- Martin, Samuel E. (2006). A Reference Grammar of Korean. Tokyo: Tuttle.
- Byon, Andrew Sangpil (2017). Modern Korean Grammar: A Practical Guide. London: Routledge.
- Song, Kyung-An (2010). "Various Evidentials in Korean." Proceedings of PACLIC 24, pp. 871–880.