# The ~는/은데 sentence ending pattern



## chifladoporlosidiomas

Ok, I need to know the difference between:
"가고 싶지 않아" and "가고 싶지 않는데"

If I remember correctly, they both mean "I dont want to go", but the second one is kinda like, "I dont wanna go, but....."

Is this correct? Its been a long time (3 years) since I've had any contact with the language..... 

Thanks in advance


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## 조금만

I don't envy the lot of our native speaking contributors when faced with this (nevertheless fascinating and important) query. The reason being that I suspect the more experience someone has of speaking Korean, the more difficult it becomes even to begin to provide an adequate overview of all the many and various roles the all-pervasive 는/은데 pattern plays in spoken Korean. 

I think the core of the difficulty is that this pattern is all about doing something that in English we do relatively rarely but which Koreans do all the time, for deep-seated cultural reasons, namely incorporate explicit although unelaborated allusions to a broader context into their conversational exchanges. And this is indeed primarily a pattern used in speech. Not that it is colloquial or (necessarily informal). But of its very nature it implies some sort of interpersonal context surrounding the speech act itself (though not necessarily reciprocal: you will indeed never hear this in a news bulletin, for example, but the pattern does occur even in structured and scripted talks of the kind where the speaker makes meaningful eye-contact with the audience, even if he/she is delivering a monologue where verbal responses are not expected)  That context, known to all parties, is essentially what this pattern is pointing towards. But since there are a huge varieties of possible context for many speech acts, there is an equally large variety of meanings the pattern can convey, or rather, hint at. In the example given alone, for instance, the "but" could have a variety of expansions, depending on the context (which we don't know here). 

"...but since it's you that's asking me, I will / but I might go nevertheless if offered a little extra persuasion"  

"... and why are you asking since you know very well I'm busy/ don't like going to that particular place / went there only yesterday"  

"... but I don't want you to take offence, even though my refusal is final, so I'm softening my refusal, but without undoing it."

And many more. But it's time I shut up and let people better qualified to speak get a word in.


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## chifladoporlosidiomas

Ok, here's how the conversation went: 

My friend (native Korean speaker) : 야, 너 library 왜 안 갔어?

Me (non native Korean speaker): 난 내 숙제를 해야 했고 가고 싶지 않았는데...

I was asking because my nosy friend on facebook was asking what it meant, and I kinda had a hard time explaining it to her.


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## HJ:)

well,

"가고 싶지 않아" it sounds more demanding. you are TELLING them you don't want to go,
as for "가고 싶지 않는데" , here, you are more lke saying, you don't feel like going.


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## 조금만

Now we have the vital context...

-야, 너 library 왜 안 갔어?

- 난 내 숙제를 해야 했고 가고 싶지 않았는데...

I had to do my homework so I didn't want to go [and now that I've given that explanation you'll probably understand that I had a good reason, and so back off from that rather fierce "야!" attitude to my absence in your question]


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## chifladoporlosidiomas

thanks for the replies. Ill tell my friend that it gives background to a statement based on the what was previously stated by the listener.


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## 조금만

chifladoporlosidiomas said:


> it gives background to a statement based on the what was previously stated by the listener.



That will fit the case you have to explain to your friend well enough. And it's very close to the formulation used in standard texts that discuss this pattern (e.g. Integrated Korean Beginning 2 section G8.2)

My slight worry about such accounts is that they considerably understate the huge variety of possible forms such contextual references take. 

For instance in a TV drama I was watching recently, a man rings up a householder and says "난 박석두라는 사람인데" in a menacing tone.  That tone, plus the 는/은데 ending, and the absence of the polite marker expected when addressing a stranger over the phone, gives a meaning something like "My name is PSD, [and I expect you'll have heard of me, though I bet you weren't expecting me to call]"  Or in another drama, a woman presses the button on an entryphone ouside a house, and when asked who's there replies "아까 전화해던 사람 있는데유" = I('m the person who) called up earlier [so that should be enough information for you to open the door and let me in, since it tells you who I am and why I've come]

This is a really difficult expression for learners to grasp. If they look it up in grammar books, they get an inevitably partial formulation. But if they ask a friendly native speaker, they tend to get, in the best of faith, the first couple of examples that come in to their informant's head, which again tell only a very small part of a very big story...


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