Well, the winter quarter starts...

And what am I taking? Of course, I'm taking the second course in the series of Beginning Korean. Half of the folks from last quarter's class are there, plus a lot of new folks. A lot of new folks who can really speak Korean since they're heritage speakers. This is just like when I took advanced Indonesian at UC Berkeley, except for the fact that I was the only non-heritage speaker in that class. It made for some good language learning, however.

Anyway, we're reviewing the "past tense" forms (I really don't know yet whether Korean really has "tense") this week. We're also learning about "probability", which is interesting in Korean because the way one does it is given a verb root, you add the suffix -l and the definite verbal form "geo-i-da". This itself may not seem remarkable, but "geo-i-da" also signifies "it is a thing", with the specialized pronunciation [ggeo-i-da], the same as if one were saying "This is mine/my thing" (Igeon je ggeo-ye-yo). It's pronounced the same way in this case, so the forms are probably directly related. If that's the case, then "probability" of doing X would be expressed by stating an activity that is in the realm of X. It's a longshot, but it's worth a try.