Led by Ju Si-gyeong Simulacrum
About this course
The fifth unit of the GCSE Korean. Hangul gave the script; Nouns and Particles, Verbs, and Honorifics gave the morphological inventory. This unit gives the syntax — how Korean sentences are built once the morphology is in place. Ju Si-gyeong leads (Korean syntax was the second great area his work established, after morphology) with Magister on the IGCSE-format applied tasks: reading authentic prose at speed, the email-or-article task, structured composition on each of the five topic areas, and translation Korean↔English as a discipline.
Text-only by design. All work is on the page. Korean syntax is fully visible in writing — word order, embedded clauses, indirect speech, the sentence-final particles all appear on the page. The unit can deliver Korean syntax in full without any audio component.
Four modules. The unit produces a student who can read connected Korean prose with confidence, write paragraphs of at least 200 words that read as native Korean, and handle the embedded-clause and indirect-speech constructions essential for serious reading.
Led by Ju Si-gyeong Simulacrum
The question
Ju Si-gyeong opens with the architectural fact that reorganises everything the student knows about sentence structure: Korean is Subject-Object-Verb, and head-final throughout. The verb arrives last; modifiers precede the modified; relative clauses precede their head noun; adverbs precede verbs. Korean's particle-marked grammar allows surprising word-order flexibility within the verb-last constraint, but the verb-last rule itself is iron. The student also learns the Korean reading strategy: when faced with a long sentence, find the verb first (always at the end), then unpack the rest backwards.
Outcome
The student can read connected Korean prose by finding the verb first; produce SOV sentences confidently in their own composition; and handle topic-front and word-order variation without losing the verb-last discipline.
Sub-units
Led by Ju Si-gyeong Simulacrum
The question
Korean builds complex sentences by embedding clauses. Relative clauses modify nouns: 제가 읽은 책 (the book I read). Four relative-marking endings — -는, -(은)ㄴ, -(을)ㄹ, -던 — encode tense and aspect within the embedded clause. Nominalisation turns clauses into noun-like expressions: 것 (general thing/fact), -기 (activity-name), -(으)ㅁ (abstract noun). Once the student has these, they can read Korean prose at any complexity, because almost every long sentence in Korean is built by stacking embedded clauses.
Outcome
The student can produce relative clauses across the four endings, build complex relative clauses with multiple internal constituents, and choose between the three nominalisers based on meaning.
Sub-units
Led by Ju Si-gyeong Simulacrum
The question
When a Korean writer reports what someone else said, the report goes through a special construction: -다고 하다 for statements, -(으)냐고 하다 for questions, -자고 하다 for propositives, -(으)라고 하다 for commands. The original verb shifts to plain form; the reporting marker attaches; a verb of saying (말하다, 말씀하시다, 묻다, 여쭙다, 부탁하다) completes the structure. The choice of reporting verb encodes the speaker-rank relation. The student learns to read news-style reports and to summarise dialogue in compact written form.
Outcome
The student can shift any direct-speech sentence into indirect speech in writing, choose the appropriate reporting verb by speaker rank, and write a news-style paragraph summarising what multiple speakers said.
Sub-units
Led by Ju Si-gyeong Simulacrum
The question
Long Korean writing requires the conditional system in full (-(으)면 real conditional, -다면 hypothetical, -(으)면서 simultaneous, -아도/어도 concessive) and the sentence-final particles that adjust the speaker's stance: -요 (politeness softener), -지 (shared knowledge), -네 (new perception / mild surprise), -다/-구나 (exclamation). These particles do not change the sentence's truth-conditional content; they change the speaker's stance. Reading them carefully is the difference between reading Korean as words and reading Korean as voice. The module concludes with a connected composition (200+ words) on one of the five IGCSE topic areas and translation work in both directions.
Outcome
The student can deploy the full conditional and concessive system in writing, use each of the four core sentence-final particles appropriately, and write a connected piece of at least 200 Korean words on a chosen IGCSE topic area with appropriate idiom and stance.
Sub-units