osi gugyeojyeosseul ttae darimiro darimjilhaeyo.

When clothes are wrinkled, iron them with an iron.

Breakdown of osi gugyeojyeosseul ttae darimiro darimjilhaeyo.

• ~이: subject particle
• ~로: instrumental particle
• 옷: clothes
• ~때: when

Questions & Answers about osi gugyeojyeosseul ttae darimiro darimjilhaeyo.

How does 구겨졌을 때 break down grammatically and what does it mean?

• 구기다 means “to wrinkle” or “to crush.”
• Its passive/intransitive form is 구겨지다, meaning “to get wrinkled.”
• Adding the past tense marker -었- gives 구겨졌- (“has gotten wrinkled”).
• Appending -을 때 (“when”) yields 구겨졌을 때, literally “when (it) has become wrinkled.”

So 옷이 구겨졌을 때 means “when the clothes are wrinkled” or “once the clothes have become wrinkled.”

What’s the difference between using -었을 때 and -으면 in this sentence?

• -었을 때 focuses on the time after something has happened (“at the time when”).
• -으면 is a conditional “if/when,” often implying “whenever” or “if it gets wrinkled.”

Both are possible here:
• 옷이 구겨졌을 때 다리미로 다림질해요 (“When the clothes are wrinkled, I iron them.”)
• 옷이 구겨지면 다리미로 다림질해요 (“If/when the clothes get wrinkled, I iron them.”)

The nuance is subtle: -으면 feels more like a general rule or condition, while -었을 때 pinpoints the moment it’s already wrinkled.

Why is 옷이 marked with the subject particle -이 instead of the object particle -을?

Because 구겨지다 is passive/intransitive: the clothes themselves undergo the action of getting wrinkled. In Korean, the undergoer of a passive verb is treated as the grammatical subject, so it takes -이/가. If you used an active verb like 다리다 (“to iron”), you would mark 옷 with -을 (e.g., 옷을 다려요).