Korean Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, teachers and students of the Korean language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In the following conversation:
그럼 지금 진촌극장 홈페이지에 들어가 볼게요. (...) 어? 자녁 시간에는 남은 좌석이 거의 없네요.
그래요? 그럼 상영관이 좀 작긴 하지만 중앙극장에는 좌석이 있을지도 몰라요.
(연세한국어 듣기와 읽기 3-1 p.44)
The translation is shown as "Although the theater is a little small, there might be seats in the center theater.".
But I don't understand why it use 작긴 instead of 작은. How does 작긴 work grammatically in the sentence?
The 긴 in 작긴 is a contraction of 기는, which is one of the ways (stem+기) that Korean nominalizes verbs/adjectives, followed by the particle 은/는 used in a contrastive sense to express that the previous thing holds/is the case (but something else doesn't/isn't). Adding 하지만 ~ after allows us to express this "but" explicitly, and add in what about the topic/subject doesn't hold (This comes from adding 하다 to ~기 in order to turn it back into a verb). All together, "A긴(A기는) 하지만 B" is used in a similar sense to "While/although (it is true that) A, B (holds / is also the case (in spite of A))".
