Presenting a fresh and accessible description of the language, this engaging grammar uses clear, jargon-free explanations to give a concise and convenient guide to the basic grammatical structure of Standard Korean.

Preface  List of Abbreviations and Notations  Glossary  0. Introduction  Korean and its speakers  1. Writing system  2.1. History  2.2. Inventory  2.3. Romanization  2. Pronunciation  2.1. The Syllable  2.2. Consonants   2.3. Vowels  2.4. Intonation  3. Sentence  3.1. The elements of a simple sentence  3.1.1. Subject  3.1.2. Object  3.1.2. Predicate  3.2. Sentence patterns  3.3. Basic word order  4. Words  4.1. Types of vocabulary  4.2. Expanding words  5. Verbs  5.1. Action verbs  5.2. Descriptive verbs  5.3. Two kinds of 'be'  5.4. Making new verbs  5.5. Marking time and aspect  5.6. Honorification  5.6.1. Subject honorification  5.6.2. Addressee honorification   5.6.3. Reference honorification  5.7. Causatives and passives  6. Nouns, pronouns, classifiers, noun phrases  6.1. Proper and common nouns   6.2. Pronouns  6.3. Numerals and numeral classifiers  6.3. Making new nouns  6.4. Making noun phrases  6.5. Noun compounds  6.6. Word order in noun phrases  6.7. Case marking  7. Modifiers  7.1 Adverbs  7.2 Noun modifiers  7.3 Deictics  8. Mimetic words  8.1. Reduplication  8.2. Vowel  9. Negation  9.1. Short-form  9.2. Long-form  10. Expanded sentences  10.1. Compound sentences  10.2. Complex sentences  11. Casual speech  12. Linguistic protocol  12.1. Choosing the appropriate speech form  12.2. Honorific readjustments and politeness strategies  12.3. Language, ideology, and society  Glossary of terms with explanations  List of particles, suffixes, and sentential endings  Further reading

Korean: An Essential Grammar is a concise and convenient guide to the basic grammatical structure of standard Korean. Presenting a fresh and accessible description of the language, this engaging Grammar uses clear, jargon-free explanations and sets out the complexities of Korean in short, readable sections.

Key features include:

• clear explanations of grammatical terms
• frequent use of authentic examples
• the Korean alphabet used alongside McCune-Reischauer romanization system
• a full glossary of explanations.