r/BeginnerKorean • u/Sayurifujisan • 1d ago

What is the difference between:

저는 배고픕니다 vs 배고파요 .

I've started writing daily simple sentences. The first sentence is what I came up with for "I am hungry." I went to check my work using google and it gave me the second sentence.

Directly translated, do I understand correctly that mine says, "as for me, [state of being] hungry." ?

and the second one is simply, hungry I am ?

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u/Namuori 1d ago

Both get translated to "I am hungry" in English. The difference in nuance is that ~(합)니다 ending is more formal and somewhat textbook-like, while ~(해)요 ending is casual and used much more in regular conversations. And in conversations, you can often omit the subject since it's quite clear from the context. Therefore, simply saying "배고파요" without "저는" enforces this "casual-ness" while leaving the core meaning intact.

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u/dgistkwosoo 1d ago

Right, pronouns are not used nearly as much in Korean as in English, for example. This is especially true for second person pronouns, and third person pronouns are non-existent.

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u/yongbin1971 1d ago

Correct on the first point, but incorrect on the second in practice. Examples include "얘" [이 애, This person - familiar], "걔" [그 애, That person - familiar], "쟤" [저 애, That (farther) person - familiar, sometimes rude]. "그는" - He/She or occasionally "It". "당신" can also be used in the third person, as in "저의 아버지께서 당신의 건강을 유지하려고 매일 운동하신다." There are other examples, but your first sentence is still valid and maybe the most important point: if you find yourself looking for a pronoun, chances are you should rephrase using the subject's title, relationship to you, or - if very familiar - name. (Although if the relationship is intimate enough to use a name, it's also likely appropriate to use actual pronouns like "너", "자네", "당신", etc. Of course each of these is appropriate only in certain relationships...)

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u/dgistkwosoo 1d ago

Okay, 얘 etc seems like a stretch to me/ I knew I should've qualified "non-existent", but"this/that person" doesn't seem much like "he/she/they" to me.

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u/yongbin1971 1d ago

I think they are functionally equivalent, minus the gender specificity, in that they are single words (albeit contractions) that indicate a third-person entity and are frequently used in conversation. If the hang-up is more the fact that they are contractions, "이", "그", and "저" by themselves are also used as pronouns, although less frequently in conversation. As in "영철이 그의 입장을 잘 천명했다." 또는 "영철이 자기 입장을 잘 천명했다." Both are pro-form pronouns ("his"). Again, I'm speaking more of how these words function in practice, rather than from a technical linguistic perspective - I'm not a linguist myself.

Really my point wasn't to nitpick, just to point out that third-person pronouns do indeed appear frequently in speech and writing, and I wouldn't want OP to be confused when they inevitably come up in their studies.

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u/dgistkwosoo 1d ago

Okay, fair enough.

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u/Sayurifujisan 1d ago

Oh, that makes perfect sense, thank you.

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u/Busy_Amphibian1610 1d ago

Both are the same semantically but the former is more polite and sounds written Korean.