"Men and women"
Translation:남자들과 여자들
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Just to add, refer to this Reddit post with more elaboration, and examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/2k33ed/와_vs_과_vs_하고/clhgdm5
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Okay so 들 gets dropped a lot but what i don't understand is, how would i understand the plural in a sentence if there is no marker indicating it? Could someone provide an example sentence? Thank you :)
3260
I thought the plural marker, 들, was not used in general statements? (https://pastebin.com/uafCbi6Y)
Korean uses an alphabet -- but unlike in English, where the letters are just written next to each other, Korean groups letters together into square blocks, one for each syllable.
If Korean were written like English, then the first word in Duo's sentence, namjadeul, would be written ㄴㅏㅁㅈㅏㄷㅡㄹ -- you should be able to see the eight Korean letters n-a-m-j-a-d-eu-l next to each other. So ㄴ stands for the consonant n, ㅏ for the vowel a, and so on. (The Korean sound often written eu in English is one sound and so is written with just one letter in Korean.)
But instead of writing them next to each other, the letters are grouped into syllables. So the first syllable nam is written not ㄴㅏㅁ but instead 남. You should be able to see the same three letters, but the n and a are written next to each other and then the ending consonant m is written beneath the first two letters, so that the entire syllable fits into a square.
Since Korean uses an alphabet, the individual characters don't have a meaning on their own; they're just used to write the sounds of Korean words.
For example, in English, the three letters bat don't have a meaning as a shape, but together they're used to write the English word for a flying mammal and also the English word for a wooden stick used to a hit the ball in baseball, because both of those words are pronounced /bæt/. Those three letters are also used to write the beginning of the word battery, even though batteries have nothing to do with bats -- it's the pronunciation that counts.
Like that in Korean as well: the individual syllables don't have meanings of their own; they are just used to write Korean words that have that pronunciation. And sometimes, two or more words might have the same pronunciation (as with bat-the-animal and bat-the-stick in English) and so might be spelled the same.
Sometimes, two words that have the same pronunciation are still spelled differently, for historical reasons -- a bit like "meet" and "meat" in English, or "cereal" and "serial".
So to read Korean, you have to know how the letters are pronounced, then how to put them together to read syllables, and then put the syllables together to make words -- and know what those words mean.
Fortunately, words in Korean are usually separated by spaces, so you can tell where one word ends and the next one begins. However, some things that we might consider separate words are written together with the preceding word in Korean.
In this exercise, if you take everything up to the first space, you have 남자들과.
남 is nam (ㄴㅏㅁ), 자 is ja (ㅈㅏ), 들 is deul (ㄷㅡㄹ), and 과 is gwa (ㄱㅘ: g + wa, where the wa sound is itself made up of ㅗㅏ which by themselves are read o and a).
The bits in parentheses are just to show the individual letters making up the syllables -- you'll never see it written like that in Korean.
Now let's put those syllables together into words.
남자 or namja means "man". The 들 is a plural marker -- a little bit like the -s we add to English words such as "cats" or "dogs" to make them plural. (But Korean uses 들 a lot less often than English uses -s, mostly relying on context to show whether something is singular or plural.) So 남자들 namjadeul is "men" -- the plural of 남자 namja "man".
And the 과 gwa at the end means "and". We'd write that as a separate word in English but it's written together with the preceding word in Korean.
Whew! So now we've read 남자들과 and it means "men and".
After the space comes 여자들 which is yeojadeul -- it's made up of 여자 yeoja which means "woman" and 들 deul which is again the (rarely used) plural marker: woman + plural = women.
(The syllable 여 yeo doesn't start with a consonant sound; the sound is just the vowel ㅕ yeo. But you can't write a syllable in Korean that doesn't start with a consonant letter, so syllables that start with a vowel sound have the letter ㅇ at the beginning, which doesn't stand for any sound when it's at the beginning of a syllable. Thus the syllable made up of ㅇ (no sound) +ㅕ yeo is 여 yeo.)
Does that help a bit?
The form of "and" depends on the end of the previous syllable: 와 after vowels and 과 after consonants.
Thus "men and ..." can be either 남자들과 or 남자와 -- but not 남자들와.
The plural suffix 들 is used a lot less in Korean than -s is in English, so just 남자 by itself can mean either "man" or "men".
So you can add it or leave it out -- but the form of "and" will change depending on whether it comes after the -a of namja or after the -l or namjadeul.
(Sort of the opposite of how English "a/an" works, which is sensitive to the beginning of the next word: "an apple" but "a big apple". Saying "a apple" or "an big apple" would be simply wrong.)
Well, I'm not sure but "및" means "and", and also maybe it was wrong because if you write "남자 와 여자들" with the "와" separate, it will be translated as "man with woman", but if you put it together it will be translated as "man and woman". But you are right wit the options, because "밎" it wasn't actually an option. (sorry, I'm not really very good at English) I hope I helped you! :) PD:also, I'm not sure if I'm right, so if I'm not just tell me
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For some reason, I really like the sound of this sentence fragment. It echoes in my mind frequently. I hope there are many things like this in Korean.
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I'm a bit confused about that. I think though 들 is used as a plural marker, this isn't its only meaning, or it is not limited to the English sense of plural. The English dictionary doesn't mention it, but the Chinese and Japanese ones seem to. It can also mean something like etc. For instance it might be after my name -- how I've been addressed might come out as 숀들. Of course I myself am not plural, but it means the group with me, whatever that may be in the context.
"남자들은 사람입니다. The men are people. Referring to actual, specific men" -- repeated from the notes. I'm a bit surprised at this too, but it may be so . . .
1533
Would I be correct in saying; "와" would be used after a singular noun, and "과" would be used after a plural noun?
What was your entire answer?
Did you use the correct form of the word for "and", for example?
Remember that if you want to use 와/과 that the form 와 comes after a vowel and 과 comes after a consonant, so "men and ..." can be either 남자들과 or 남자와 but not, for example, 남자과.
(Korean uses the ending -들 a lot less than English uses the plural, so "men" is often merely 남자.)
I answer this with 남자 와 여자, but it said that I have typo and it corrected me with 남자 및 여자. Then I open this comment section, and the correct answer is 남자들과 여자들. I can understand after read the comments about 들 and the different between 와/과 and 하고, but still don't get it why there is an 'and' translated to '및'.