"A man receives a gift from a woman."
Translation:남자는 여자에게서 선물을 받습니다.
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9 times out 10 when I see the sentence start with "A" I use nin particle and when the sentence starts with "The" I use ga particle. It seems to work.
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A / An Apple, is NOT specific, thats when you use 은/는 . Otherwise, The Apple, which IS specific, thats when you use 이/가 . There may not be any articles in the Korean language, but there are STILL ways to imply soecificity through the use of particles like those mentioned above.
English articles cannot be mapped cleanly onto Korean particles.
-은/는 marks a topic – basically the central thing you are giving (or asking) new information about. The topic always has to be something already known to the listener. That could be:
- Something which has already come up earlier in the conversation,
- A name or noun behaving like a name (e.g. “mom”) which the listener is expected to be familiar with,
- A general category (e.g. “dogs”).
There is some overlap with English “the” here because English marks nouns which have already come up before with “the”. But categories 2. and 3. would not have “the” (in fact 3. could be “a” because you can take single individual to talk about the category as a whole: “a dog does not sweat = dogs (in general) do not sweat”).
Note that something being the “topic” does not tell you anything about how the noun relates to the verb action. It could be the subject, it could be the object, it could be something else entirely. We have to use context to tell.
-이/가 marks the subject of the verb if it is not the topic. Since it is not the topic, none of the restrictions for topics above apply. The noun could be known already or it might not. It could be a proper name or a general category but it doesn’t have to be. All that’s important is that this noun is the subject of the verb.
For example:
- 식탁에 사과가 있습니다. “There is an apple on the table.”
- 그 사과는 매우 빨갛습니다. “The apple is very red.”
Sentence 1. introduces the apple to the conversation. Since the listener doesn’t know about it yet, we cannot use -는. Thus, since the apple is not the topic, it gets marked with -가 because it’s the subject of the verb 있다 “to be there, to exist”. English uses “a” here, also because the apple has not come up before. In sentence 2. the apple is now known, so the speaker can make it the topic (by marking it with -는 and give new information about it.
Note how the assignment of articles in English is the exact opposite of what you described: “a” where the noun was marked with -가 in Korean and “the” where the noun was marked with -는 in Korean. So there is no direct correlation. In fact the only way I can imagine a noun being marked with “a” in English but -은/는 in Korean is if a single individual is used to represent a general category (“a dog does not sweat”) because nouns which have come up before use “the” in English and proper names don’t use any article at all.
-에게 is a case particle which can mean either “to (a person)” or “from (a person)”. Which one it is depends on the verb: If the subject is the sender, then -에게 marks the receiver and vice versa. -에게서 is narrower: It can only mark the receiver. So for “[I] received a present from my brother”, you can say 형에게 선물을 받았습니다 or 형에게서 선물을 받았습니다. But for “[I] gave a present to my brother”, you can only say 형에게 선물을 줬습니다, not 형에게서.
*받십니다 doesn’t exist. It’s either 받습니다 or 받으십니다. The latter form is composed of the same verb stem 받- + the honorific (respectful) suffix -시- (but because the stem ends in a consonant you have to insert 으 in between) + the verb ending -ㅂ니다 (since -시- ends in a vowel you use -ㅂ니다 rather than -습니다 here).
It means “from“.
You can always replace use just -에게 instead of -에게서 – but the other way around doesn’t always work. -에게 can mean either “to (a person)” or “from (a person)” depending on the verb and when it means the latter you can make it more explicit by using -에게서 instead. But when -에서 means “to”, then it would be incorrect to replace it with -에게서.