# Posted: 28 Oct 2006 19:12 KST - Edited by: jcs
... Re-Sideview ...
In Korean some verbs are not always just verbs; they can also function as adjectives.
What does this mean?
Take for example, take 예쁘다 which means "pretty". In English this plainly is an adjective; "she is pretty" has the plain vanilla word order of subject + verb + predicate adjective. However, in Korean, they simply say "그녀는 예쁘다" which is in direct translation "she pretty". See? What in English is a subject + verb + adjective is in Korean just subject + verb . I have not yet come up with an example in English where the same word is a verb and also an adjective.
| Table 1: difference in English between verbs and adjectives |
| adjective | verb | | to be pretty | prettify, to make pretty, to prettify | | beautiful | to make beautiful; beautify | | gold | to make golden, to be of gold, to turn into gold | | bright | brighten, make bright |
| clear | clarify, make it clear |
.... However, this is common in Korean.
Some examples of adjectival verbs are:
1) 밝다 which can mean "bright" or "shiny"
2) 늙다 which means "old".
3) 있다 which means to be.
Some examples:
저 집이 큽니다 that house is big
is 크다 an adjective? is it a verb? NO! it's an .... adjectival verb!
Verbs which act in this sense are called adjectival verbs or alternatively descriptive verbs. The verb stems (the part preceding the 다) is abbreviated in the Korean study materials as VST, which stands for verb stem. The descriptive verbs are abbreviated DV for short.
A complete list of the most popular adjectives in Korean.
For an advanced lesson on adjectives, please see this other lesson which is entirely dealing with relative clauses (the person which/ the thing that / the thing which) or the next lesson which gives you more information on adjective formations.
adjectives do not take objects!!!
this post explains the difference between 좋다 (an adjective) and 좋아하다 (a verb).
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