# 무서워 or 무섭다, etc.



## maghanish2

안녕하세요!

I hope you guys can help me with this very confusing question.

In casual-speaking Korean, I have seen the four following ways to simply say *I'm scared*, and cannot find anything to tell me how they are different from each other.

무서워
무섭다
무섭네
무서운다

From the places I've seen each version, they all seem to have a similar meaning, but I really don't understand how. If you could explain this it would be very great!

갑사합니다!


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## funkcode

무서워, 무섭다 is same.
They have slightly diffrent that 무서워 is used in spoken language.

무섭네
It has more means to agree 

ex) 
a: 이 영화 정말 무섭다.
b: 응, 무섭네

무서운다
It is incorrect expression. 
I think that you known expression is 무서웁다. 
But, it is incoreect expression too,


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## maghanish2

고맙습니다.

So you would never say 무섭다, but if you write it it's exactly the same as 무서워?

Hmmm.....maybe I misread the 무서운다, but I know I have seen similar things where -ㄴ다 is added to a word.  Like for example: 거기 간다.

I believe I've seen that.  But is it still wrong?


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## funkcode

I mean.
무서워 is more used than 무섭다 in spoken language. because 무서워 is soft expression.

무서웠다, 무서웠어 is past expression. It means that i was scared.

But, I dont know 무서 - ㄴ다.


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## 조금만

To repeat the essence of what funkcode has already said, the difference between 무섭다 and 무서워 has nothing to do with the meaning of the root (or of the form as a whole): it's simply a difference of speech styles. So you could ask the same question, with the same answer, about the corresponding two forms of any predicator ('adjective' or 'verb') whatsoever. Between 고맙다 and 고마워 for instance.

The first of those pairs is in 해라체 or 'plain' speech style. The second is in 해체 ('informal' or 'intimate') speech style. That's why, as funkcode has said, you would encounter 무서워 in speech where the 'initimate' style was appropriate. 

However, I would add to funkcode's remarks that 해라체 or 'plain' forms do occur in speech as well, often, in modern usage, freely mixed with 해체 styles. The essential difference is that the 'plain' style has a wider range of additional applications where you could not use 해체. In impersonal writing, for instance, such as in newspaper reports (which differ from broadcast news reports, where the formal style is used), in formal academic writing or speaking (as distinct from talks for a general audience, where the 'polite' style is often used), in stage directions, in talking aloud to oneself, and in reported speech (irrespective of the speech style of the original words that are being reported by a third party). In all those contexts, 무섭다 might well be found.

But I imagine you may already know all that, with the problem being that you hadn't perhaps recognised the two forms in question as instances of those two speech styles, because of the ways predicates with bases ending in ㅂ behave when forming the two styles.

As for 무섭네: taking funkcode's valuable example,
a: 이 영화 정말 무섭다.
b: 응, 무섭네
one might say that the 네 particle (which can of course be attached to a wide range of predicates, not just this one) expresses intense or enthusiastic agreement: "Yup! It sure is!"   It needn't always be a response to what someone else has said, though. It can be a spontaneous exclamation. 와, 무섭네 -- Gosh, that's scarey!!!

As for the mysterious *무서운다: you don't by any chance mean  무서우냐  do you? (the 'plain' style interrogative = are you scared?)  Or possibly 무서운, which is the adnominal form used to turn the base into an 'adjective' in the Western grammatical sense?  

The latter can mean, depending on context, 'scared' or 'scarey' / 'worried' or 'worrying', illustrating two tricky things about this root. First that its semantic field overlaps two areas in English: FEAR and WORRY. Secondly that, like the English "fearful/fearsome" it can mean both FEEL FEAR and CAUSE FEAR. (Compare "The consequences may be fearful" with "I am fearful for the consequences": same phenomenon in English here, the context decides the meaning, not the form of the key word itself).


On maghanish2's follow-up question:                                                              간다 is indeed fine, and commonly found. It's the plain-style form of 가다.  In other words, it's the form corresponding to 무섭다. The difference is down to the different behaviour of the two different root forms when plain-style endings are to be added.


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## maghanish2

Thank you very much for your very helpful response 조금만 which added to the great help that funkcode had already given.

I think I did see 무서우냐 and maybe it was just a typo on my behalf, which made things a bit more confusin.  Does that mean that 무서우냐 is similar to, for example, 무섭니?  I get very confused sometimes with the countless endings it seems you can add.

Also, I want to clarify, that 간다 is all right, so is this process of adding -ㄴ다 to a word only applied if the verb/adjective ends in a vowel?  For example, could you say: 

그는 엄청 착한다?  or would it be better said 그는 엄청 착하다?

I hope I am making myself clear, I am just quite baffled by the seemingly innummerable number of endings each word can have.  Thanks again!


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## 조금만

maghanish2 said:


> [...]
> Does that mean that 무서우냐 is similar to, for example, 무섭니?


~냐 and ~니 are equivalent variant forms of the plain non-past interrogative ending (the former more common in writing, the latter in speech) But you need to add them to the correct base. So not *무섭니 but 무서우니.



maghanish2 said:


> [...]
> 그는 엄청 착한다? or would it be better said 그는 엄청 착하다?


I don't think 그는 엄청 착하다? makes sense.  하다 is the "dictionary" form which you would need to conjugate here. And 한다, though possible in this construction, is a 'plain' style _statement_, not a question, as your question mark would seem to suggest you want it to be.



maghanish2 said:


> I am just quite baffled by the seemingly innummerable number of endings each word can have.



It certainly can get puzzling. One basic way to get a little more clarity is to distinguish firmly between differences which encode speech styles (where the same endings for a given mode and tense in a given speech style are applicable to all bases, so it doesn't matter what the base is) and differences which are due to the way different bases behave, depending on whether they end with a vowel or a consonant, and in the latter case, what that consonant is (where the endings for a given style remain constant, but you have to do different things to the base in order to "glue on" the ending). I get the impression, though I may be quite mistaken, that you are currently a little confused between those two essentially different things.

The impression I get from comparing notes with other learners is that one source of the problem is the way that most textbooks used in classes or for self-instruction spread out the learning of Korean predicate conjugations over a long period (sometimes two years or more of class instruction) Texts authored exclusively by native speakers in particular seem to want to make heavy weather of Korean predicate forms, especially where "irregular" predicates are concerned, delaying the introduction of those with bases ending in 'ㅂ' as if they would cause learners to take flight in panic if brought out of the cupboard too soon. 

For people who want to approach Korean learning in a strongly structured way, I personally favour the approach taken by King and Yeon in their Elementary Korean. As they say in their Preface: "Lesson Seven is the "heartbreak hill" of the course. If students don't survive it, they will not survive the course (or ever learn Korean, for that matter)" That Lesson takes learners through nearly all the conjugational paradigms to be found in Korean predicates. After that, everything is fine tuning. I do think that Korean predicate patterns are sufficiently orderly and amenable to rules (a lot of what Korean grammarians call "irregular" predicates are tame indeed compared to the horrors that await learners in, say, Italian verb behaviour) to be learned by that sort of boot camp approach. You might want to take a look at that text, if you don't know it already, and try that approach for size.

The other thing I would say, again maybe rashly or even impudently, is that I wonder whether you aren't focussing a little too much on reading Korean rather than listening to it. You refer to having "seen" word-forms. The trouble is that our eyes don't really always connect up with our ears when we look at written language. Whereas listening to native speakers speaking away ensures that what goes into our brains via our ears is the Right Stuff. After a time, it is possible to recognise that some of our attempts to form predicates simply sound wrong, because we've never heard a native speaker use them. That kind of error-filtering knowledge can't be gleaned from books, and although it isn't sufficient to let us get our predicates right, it helps us weed out some incorrect attempts without needing to consult our conscious knowledge or our reference books.

Sorry if this seems very far from the original query. It's just that I felt that some of the points in the query and follow up don't really lend themselves to "spot treatment" without some attempt to get to more general underlying problems of which these queries seem to me to be expressions.


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## want8

You can't use '무서운다' or '착한다' because '무섭다(to be scary, to be scared)' and '착하다(to be kind)' are both adjectives. '-ㄴ다' form is the simple present narrative tense to describe a person or a story (at times, the present progressive tense) and only used in verbs. 

For example, 

먹다(to eat) - 먹는다
가다(to go) - 간다
자다(to sleep) - 잔다

are possible, but

어렵다(to be difficult) can't be transformed into '어려운다'

because '어렵다' is an adjective!


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