First there is a mountain.
Then there is no mountain.
Then there is.
— Zen Poem
(also lyrics from a Donovan song)
As I am plugging along in Korean, learning hundreds of grammatical points and 18 different ways to express the future tense through nearly indiscernible differences in conjugation, I come across the following:
You start off learning lots of adjectives (aka descriptive verbs) in their “infinitive” forms all of which end in the 다 (da). 예쁘다 (yeppeu-da) means to be pretty, and one can imagine on the streets of Korea there are plenty of occasions to say so. However, it couldn’t possibly be right to go around saying things in the infinitive form (“to be pretty”) when it would be more appropriate to say “she is pretty” or “you are pretty.” Of course, there are a whole host of considerations for how casual or polite you want to be and additional subtleties that could be added to indicate that this is new information to me (e.g. I’m just discovering this).
And then I come to the lesson on a “narrative” form where the conjugation ends up exactly the same as the infinitive. So, it would have been fine to say 예쁘다 (yeppeu-da) all along as long as I wasn’t speaking to myself.
The path to enlightenment is long.