Korean Lessons ᚛ Level 6 - Upper-Intermediate Korean #1 (Lessons 151 to 180) ᚛ Lesson 152 - The past adjectival form in Korean [-던] [-았/었던]

The past adjectival form in Korean [-던] [-았/었던]

In this course: 던 / 았던 / 었던 / 했던

Reminder of the past adjectival form

In the chapter on adjectives in Korean, we saw how to qualify a noun in the past tense with a verb.

As a reminder, for action verbs, the structure was the following:

If the stem ends in a vowel: [Stem]ㄴ
If the stem ends in a consonant: [Stem]은

We thus learned to create expressions such as:

먹은 사람 = the person who ate
제가 입은 셔츠 = the shirt I wore
… etc

As for descriptive verbs (adjectives), I told you that we would see later how to express the past adjectival form.

In this chapter, we are therefore going to see a new past tense marker that has its own specificities: -던.

The past tense -던 with action verbs

With a present stem

The ending -던 can attach to the present stem of a verb in the following manner:
[Present stem]던

먹다 → 먹던
입다 → 입던
가다 → 가던
… etc

In English, it is quite difficult to give a precise translation of the -던 marker, and it is very common to translate the adjectival form in -(으)ㄴ and the one in -던 in the same way. However, in Korean, using -던 generally indicates two things:

we are recalling the situation described, like a memory
there was a certain habit of the situation described in the past

Let’s take the following two expressions:

제가 입은 셔츠
제가 입던 셔츠

제가 입은 셔츠, "the shirt I wore", is actually very neutral, just like in English. However, saying 제가 입던 셔츠 indicates that we used to wear this shirt and that we are recalling that. It is possible that we still wear it from time to time today, or maybe not: this structure does not give that information.

내가 쓰던 연필이야.
→ It's the pencil I used to use.

제가 살던 동네예요.
→ It's the neighborhood where I used to live.

내가 일하던 회사는 부도가 났어.
→ The company I used to work for went bankrupt.

저기 큰 마트는 내가 장을 보던 마트야.
→ That big supermarket over there is the supermarket where I used to do my grocery shopping.

그 아이들은 제가 가르치던 학생들이에요.
→ Those children are the students I used to teach.

이 찌개는 어머니가 요리해 주시던 맛과 똑같아요.
→ This jjigae tastes exactly like the one my mother used to cook for me.

이 책은 제가 찾던 책이에요.
→ This book is the book I was looking for.

There is another use case of the -던 structure for action verbs.