11 ms·

How to read Korean in 15 minutes

514 points by rfreytag 15y ago

steve8918 15y ago
The other thing interesting about the Korean alphabet is that the symbols take "notches" also have the same mouth formation. The notch is an indication to use the same mouth shape, but to use a "harder" sound. So the G sound and K sound have a similar mouth shape, as well as the D sound and the T sound, the J and CH sounds. My understanding, also, is that there are no exceptions to the rules, so it makes it very easy to read and write, which is awesome.
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  There are some exceptions. 입니다 is [imnida]. Complex vowels can be produced in various ways. There are dialectal things too, so I've heard. Still it is very straightforward.
  - helpbygrace 15y ago
    that kind of irregular sounds is usually happened at final consonants to move smoothly to next letter.
  - mansr 15y ago
    Another exception is 시 being pronounced [shi].
    - guard-of-terra 15y ago
      That's no more exception than st in german being pronounced [scht]. "It doesn't produce minimal pairs".
      - mansr 15y ago
        Whenever pronunciation of a letter depends on the surrounding context, you have an exception.
        guard-of-terra 15y ago
        There is no way for a pronunciation to not depend on the surrounding context. You do not spell words letter by letter. Thus minimal pairs are the king.
- Tsagadai 15y ago
  There are exceptions to those rules, hundreds of them. ㅊ(chieut/치읓) as the bottom consonant has a really difficult and varying set of rules for different words, different consonants before and different consonants as the start of the next word. Take this word 청령리 (a large transit hub for intercity bus and train travel. The transliteration from that guide is Cheong-ryeong-ri which is completely wrong. It should really be transliterated closer to Cheon-nyeong-gi. If you say that word as that guide has shown you no one will have a clue where you want to go. I live in Seoul. Non-Korean speakers frequently struggle to tell taxi drivers or to get directions to three different places: 시정 (sijeong - city hall), 신촌 (sinchon - a district in the north) and 신천 (sincheon - a district in the south). First, anyone who hasn't learned 시 is closer to 'shi' than 'see' gets nowhere. Then there is the subtle difference between ㅓ and ㅗ; ㅓ is more like 'audio' than 'eo' and ㅗ is a short 'o' sound. These things take practice. The ㅈ in 시정 becomes more of a 'ch' sound than a 'j' sound. The difference is about the same as the difference in pronunciation between the 'ch' at the start of church to the 'ch' at the end of it in English. Hard to notice, but there is a change in most peoples pronunciation for that. There are people who have been here for years who still get a taxi to the wrong place every now and then. 15 minutes might be enough time to learn the symbols if you are an adult who can already read other languages. A week is more realistic for actually remembering them. A month of practice and you will probably be able to read what people write on bits of paper at a speed that allows them to listen and follow what you say. Learning alphabets isn't too hard but it isn't easy either (I learnt the Mon alphabet in a day with a good teacher).
  - otoburb 15y ago
    When I was young, I had a problem learning to differentiante between the 'ㅓ' and 'ㅗ' sounds. My way of remembering was to think of 'ㅓ' as the weaker (i.e. less powerful) sound associated with "dumb" or "uh" (same pronunciation), and 'ㅗ' as the stronger sound associated with an exclamation of "oh!" (same as your short 'o' sound reference).
spullara 15y ago
I put together a cheat sheet a while ago: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spullara/2629936/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/spullara/2629936/ Not as entertaining but tries to show you how the various parts are derived from one another. Interesting that n is half of m.
ghiotion 15y ago
Wow. That is really neat. I've always believed that spoken languages that are constructed/contrived are doomed to failure (esperanto, klingon, etc). I'm not saying that Korean itself is contrived, but it's fascinating that the alphabet was created like that.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
  It's successful because there was no better alternative. Before that you could basically use Chinese characters with similar sounds (horrendously inefficient and distorts meaning of the Chinese characters), or just write in Classical Chinese. This system gave Korean its own writing system, and a good, simple-to-learn one at that.
  - joejohnson 15y ago
    The hangul script was also successful because it was a state-sponsored improvement over using the chinese characters for the Korean language. Sometimes it helps to have someone abruptly enforce adoption of a better method.
    - kijin 15y ago
      Interestingly, when the state tried to get Korean to adopt the new writing system in the 15th century, it failed miserably because of various political and ideological issues. Only later did Hangeul actually begin to gain popularity, and this happened organically.
    - w1ntermute 15y ago
      Not everyone supported it. Although King Sejong, who had it invented in the 1440s, was a big proponent, prominent Korean Confucian scholars opposed it on the basis that it would dilute the sway that Confucian/Chinese culture had on Korea and turn them into barbarians. The real reason was probably that by keeping the writing system so time-consuming to learn, they would be able to control the poor much beter. For example, you can read scholar Choi Manri's (a contemporary of Sejong) explanation of why he opposes hangul here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Man_Ri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Man_Ri By the way, there was an excellent South Korean historical TV drama that aired late last year called Tree With Deep Roots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_With_Deep_Roots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_With_Deep_Roots) that covered the creation of hangul by Sejong and the opposition of the entrenched nobility to its promulgation (links to 720p video and English subtitles are available if anyone's interested). In fact, hangul was banned by a subsequent king after peasants (who were previously illiterate because of the years it took to become educated in Chinese characters) made signs in hangul and started protesting outside his palace. It wasn't until the modernizing Gabo Reforms of 1894-96 that vernacular Korean replaced Classical Chinese as the official written language of the state. And even then, words of Sinitic origin (which makes up 60% of contemporary Korean vocabulary) continued to be written in Chinese characters, with hangul used only for native Korean words, similar to how Japanese is written to this day (although Japanese uses Chinese characters for many words of Japanese origin as well). It wasn't until the early 1990s that big Korean newspapers, such as the Chosun Ilbo, started dropping hanja from the majority of their writing (though it is still used in a few situations).
throwaway54-762 15y ago
Yup. I happen to be an American, English-only speaker, and a friend was able to teach me the Korean alphabet during highschool AP chemistry (oh, and I still managed to get a 5 on the exam). It's really that easy.
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  Most alphabets are trivial. It is only latin that tends to be hard, especially french or english latin (german to lesser intent), because of loose correlation between letters and sounds. Cyrillic is pretty straightforward, for example.
  - pmjordan 15y ago
    I wouldn't put English and French in the same category of phoneticism. English is all over the place[1], French pronunciation is fairly systematic. [1] Not that that's in any way surprising, considering its messy Saxon-Norman-Viking-... history.
    - luchs 15y ago
      French pronunciation might be okay, but it's definitely quite difficult the other way round because many words have some parts which just change how the rest is pronounced or have no sound at all.
    - JBiserkov 15y ago
      Ideally there is a one-to-one mapping between text and speech. To me at least French is more difficult in thespeech-to-text direction (because of all those mute letters at the end of most words esp. verb forms that sound the same parler, parlez, parlais, parlaient, parlai, parlé) while English is more difficult in the text-to-speech
      - WiseWeasel 15y ago
        English is very difficult to learn to pronounce from the writing, or to write from the pronunciation because the different words stem from a large number of roots, each with their own pronunciation and conjugation peculiarities. Writing in French is difficult to learn because there are many more verb conjugations and tenses, and nouns have often seemingly arbitrary sexes. The silent consonants are fairly consistent and systematic.
hsshah 15y ago
This is indeed surprisingly easy. Now, where's the cheat sheet for 'understanding' what we read (other than proper nouns)?!
- sandimac 15y ago
  yeah... that's a bit more difficult. i picked up the korean alphabet in an afternoon, and was able to read out loud almost any korean text put in front of me. after studying the language for a few more months, i was still only at a very low beginner level when it came to recognizing anything i read. i think it's one of the more difficult languages to learn.
  - hsshah 15y ago
    That's what I feared. Unless you are willing to commit time/effort to really learn the language, I fear the usefulness of this is limited to impressing friends and staff at Korean restaurants.
- helpbygrace 15y ago
  Korean (letter) is easy. Korean (language) is quite difficult. There are many irregular syntax and postposition. Also, there are many rules for a prolonged sound.
  - lifthrasiir 15y ago
    Modern Korean no longer distinguishes a prolonged sound at least in the written form. Virtually all words that cannot be set apart without a prolonged sound have been changed to those that can. For example, a short 이 ("teeth") and a long 이 ("two") are now homonym in most dialects of Korean; the former 이 has many synonyms like 이빨 or 치아 however, so they can be often distinguished without a context.
bsinger 15y ago
This kind of reminds me of the classic Tim Ferriss article: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn-but-not-master-any-language-in-1-hour-plus-a-favor/ http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn...
wheels 15y ago
People overestimate the difficulty in learning different alphabets (and the assumed difficulty of the languages which use them). I'm on vacation in Israel this week and learned the Hebrew alphabet with standard flash cards in 2 hours (incidentally by doing something similar to this post by remembering the names based on something the character looks like). At various points I've learned the Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets in a similar amount of time. The real difficulty is, naturally, actually learning the language. The additional burden of it using a separate regular alphabet is negligible in comparison.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
  Yeah, alphabets are usually pretty easy to learn. I can read (and write) the two syllabic Japanese "alphabets" - really syllibaries - which only took a week or two to learn. Of course, you need to practise to get good at it.
- usaar333 15y ago
  Agreed. When you don't know the language, knowing the alphabet is pretty useless. In Israel I recall being able to read signs.. and have no idea what I was actually reading. On the other hand you do have languages like Chinese where learning the written language actually is the majority of the work. Spoken Chinese is probably one of the easier languages out there for a person coming from a random language.
  - evmar 15y ago
    While visiting Israel I picked up the alphabet from the street signs and found it useful for identifying which sherut went to Jerusalem (their signs were in Hebrew only).
    - darklajid 15y ago
      That's interesting. I consider the street signs evil. Ignoring streets for which even the Israelis I know don't know how to pronounce the name (for example אבן גברויל which GMaps lists as Ibn Gabriol but ends up as something different, whenever you talk to anyone). Road signs in general wildy vary. The name 'Weizmann' (as in [1]) is generally butchered in latin script. The best form I found so far was in Acre and spelled 'Wiseman'. Often the signs just contain a transcript of the Hebrew word. I saw a couple of signs that spell out 'Nemal', which isn't particularly helpful unless you know that this is the Hebrew word for the port. Bottom line: The road signs here confuse the hell out of me. I'm amazed that they helped you learn the alphabet somehow. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann
bergie 15y ago
Cool! 15 minutes sounds about right. I learned it over a single pint on my last trip to Seoul. I can tell you navigating the city becomes easier when you start to understand signs like megchu (beer) and tsikin (chicken) :-) (sorry for the quick transliterations)
mynameishere 15y ago
You can learn to read Vietnamese much faster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet
- jarek 15y ago
  Only if you don't go cross-eyed from the diacritics and cross-tongued from the tones first...
barumrho 15y ago
I am not familiar with many languages, but something that is unique about Korean "alphabets" is that alphabets combine to form a character. This makes sentences more compact in appearance, but it also creates difficulty in creating fonts, since a single alphabet looks slightly different in combination with different alphabets. (For example, Gulim font, a standard sans-serif font, contains 49,284 glyphs according to this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Gulim. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Gulim.)
- klodolph 15y ago
  According to the web page, New Gulim includes all of CJK, for Koreans this means Hanja, which are thousands of Chinese characters that haven't really been used to write Korean since the 19th century. The actual Hangul (Korean syllabary) characters require about 30 consonants/clusters and 21 vowels/dipthongs which can appear in characters in 9 different layouts. It's much more work than the 26 latin characters, but most of the font design is going to be copy/paste. So you could say the purpose of New Gulim is not to create a "Korean font" in the sense that a font you can write Korean with, but rather the sense that Koreans can use it to write Korean mixed with Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic, and Greek characters with a unified design between scripts. That's a tall order.
  - barumrho 15y ago
    Oops, forgot about the other character sets. But, I think properly designed fonts require a lot more than what you mentioned. According to this article, for Windows, it requires 11,172. (Second paragraph in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language_and_computers#Character_encodings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language_and_computers#C...)
  - lifthrasiir 15y ago
    > It's much more work than the 26 latin characters, but most of the font design is going to be copy/paste. Not quite. While the minimal Hangul font design requires two sets of initial consonants, one set of vowels and two sets of final consonants (often called 2x1x2), it would be very quirky. Many bitmap fonts used the 8x4x8 design or its variant, the commercially available TrueType/OpenType fonts now have more than 30 sets of subtly differing glyphs. It is easier than drawing all 11,172+ glyphs but not much.
RandallBrown 15y ago
Well this explains how my Korean friend in college could type touch type in Korean and English on an American keyboard. I didn't know that Korean had an alphabet, I thought it was pictograms or whatever.
- ineedtosleep 15y ago
  Your initial thought was partially right. Though it's not used as often these days, Korean does have hanja[1] which uses Chinese characters. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja
- helpbygrace 15y ago
  before Korean was invented, Chinese letters are used in Korea. Korean was invented based on the form of mouth that need to speak that sound. For example to say 'ㄱ', your mouth should be form like that. Not all Korean letter was made based on this concept but King Sejong who is known as inventor of Korean tried to make the public learn letter and write letter quickly, that requires easily understandable form.
- kijin 15y ago
  Modern Korean has 24 alphabets, plus 2 letters (ㅐ,ㅔ) each of which is technically a combination of two other letters but usually treated as a single letter. Guess how many keys the American keyboard reserves for English alphabets? 26. No need to shift keys around or rely on complicated modifier keys, unlike even some European keyboards. Korean alphabet + American keyboard = a match made in heaven.
- otoburb 15y ago
  What makes Korean touch typists really fast is the semi-regular symbol construction. Unlike an English keyboard (whether Dvorak or Qwerty), the Hanja consonants are primarily on the left while the vowels are on the right. So you typically have an alternating typing rhythm which can make typing extremely fast. Dvorak, to a similar extent, seems to be closest to mimicking this style of typing (although I hear Colemak is better with the keystroke distribution).
WildUtah 15y ago
Next I want to learn how to read and write the kanji in fifteen minutes. Okay, oaky. I'm willing to invest as long as twenty minutes.
MichaelGG 15y ago
Some scripts are surprisingly easy to pick up. If anyone is interested in the Japanese scripts (hiragana/katakan), this book[1] will truly teach them to you in 6 hours, total. I started reading it, and thought it moronic, but as I started writing a review of why it sucked, I realised that I could recall everything perfectly... 1: http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kana-Reading-Japanese-Syllabaries/dp/0824831640/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335218962&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kana-Reading-Japanese-Syll...
dbh937 15y ago
This is why I love Hacker News. Even though this doesn't really have anything to do with startups or technology in general, it's still something that interests the types of people who read Hacker News. One of the big reasons I love HN is the community that contributes to it.
pm90 15y ago
Hindi is also a pretty straightforward language; by which I mean that the written alphabet corresponds exactly to the sounds made when speaking it. When I was in Korea, I used to write korean words in hindi (I did not know the korean alphabet then) because transliterating to english would screw up the pronunciation and unless you get the pronunciation exactly right, the locals just don't understand what you are saying.
- codyrobbins 15y ago
  Hey, would you be kind enough to email me? My address is in my profile. I’ve been looking for a Hindi speaker of Korean for a while. I’d love to ask you a few questions if you have a moment!
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
codyrobbins 15y ago
Having an alphabet, as it does, Korean indeed isn’t hard to learn to read and write. The difficulty is learning how to pronounce it properly—it has a number of distinct consonants that are treated as the same consonant in most other languages and that therefore are extremely difficult for non-native speakers to distinguish and produce properly. For example, it has three distinct unvoiced velar stops [1] which are all considered the same sound in English: normal [k], aspirated [kʰ], and faucalized [k͈]. We use both the normal and aspirated [2] unvoiced velar stops in English as positional allophones [3], meaning we consider them the same sound but they’re actually different and we distinguish between them unconsciously depending on where the sound occurs in a word. For example, /k/ is aspirated in word-initial position in words like cam but unaspirated after word-initial /s/ in words like scam. If you listen closely enough you realize that you turbulently expire a lot of air after the c in cam but don’t do so in scam. Despite using both phones [4] in English, you consider them more or less the same hard k sound—if you pronounce cam with an unaspirated /k/ it may sound slightly odd but you’ll still consider it the same word cam. The problem is that in Korean doing so would result in two different words—so it makes it hard for English speakers to perceive distinct words in Korean that differ this way, and to pronounce the correct word that they intend when talking. This is true for many languages because phoneme inventories never overlap, but it’s especially difficult for English learners of Korean because Korean has a third /k/ sound—the faucalized [5] one—and it doesn’t occur at all in English. I know phonologists—people who are trained in the study of human speech categories—who have an extremely difficult time discerning between [k] and [k͈]. Peter Ladefoged, one of the world’s foremost phoneticians, has a fantastic website to accompany his phonetics textbook and it has recordings of all the sounds known to be produced in human languages. You can listen to the distinctions between the Korean consonants here: http://phonetics.ucla.edu/appendix/languages/korean/korean.html http://phonetics.ucla.edu/appendix/languages/korean/korean.h... The /k/ sounds I’ve been discussing are the third row down (weight of measure, rope, and large). As an English speaker try to hear a difference between how the consonant is pronounced—it’s extremely difficult to notice. Our sensitivity to these phonemic distinctions develops at an extremely early age: by one month old infants already begin to stop distinguishing between different sounds that their language slots into the same category as the same “sound” [6]. Infants don’t even babble at this age never mind produce or understand adult speech, but they have already stopped noticing certain differences in speech—that’s how deeply ingrained the way we perceive and produce speech is, and why it’s almost impossible to speak a non-native language without an accent. (I am only tangentially familiar with Korean phonology so I might be getting some of the details slightly wrong here—please correct me if I’ve misstated anything.) ### [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unvoiced_velar_stop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unvoiced_velar_stop [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics) [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faucalized_voice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faucalized_voice [6] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/171/3968/303 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/171/3968/303 & http://home.fau.edu/lewkowic/web/Eimas%20infant%20speech%20discrim%20Science%201971.pdf http://home.fau.edu/lewkowic/web/Eimas%20infant%20speech%20d...
kitsune_ 15y ago
I've just returned from a 15 days trip to Korea. Being able to read Hangul was helpful, especially when trying to read menus, but in most places, road and subway signs were bilingual (English & Korean). In many ways, the country seemed to be light years ahead of other places (I'm from Switzerland). By the way, Korea is absolutely worth a visit. I think I'm infatuated with it right now. In the short time I got to know a couple of very wonderful people.
- donw 15y ago
  I'm guessing you were in Seoul? Down in Daejeon, nothing was in English, and my Hangul-reading ability was not the best.
- wingerlang 15y ago
  Did you know the meaning of the words that you translated from writings to "words"? I mean, I could read korean letters and words if I know the alphabet (somewhat) but I dont know what it means anyways.
  - bane 15y ago
    There's a surprising amount that's in English, and survival words are relatively simple. e.g. 화장실 - bathroom. You don't need to make a complicated sentence when asking where one is. Just 화장실? is enough and everybody knows you're a foreigner anyways and will know what you mean. Hello, goodbye, thank you, your welcome, are similarly easy. Food words are relatively simple and regular and if you drink alcohol there's relatively few to learn about.
- bane 15y ago
  I agree, Korea is sadly way underrated as a tourist destination. Amazingly fun, safe, tons to do (generally speaking). Everything from hiking to nightclubs. Ridiculously good public transport, fun stuff for tourists to do, interesting culture, amazing food. I've been there quite a few times and have absolutely loved every minute there.
bane 15y ago
Hangul is an astonishingly good alphabet. If it has a problem it's that it's too tightly coupled to its host language. as codyrobbins already alluded to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3881388 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3881388 it expresses the particulars of Korean extremely well, while only so-so mapping to the particulars of other languages. English, as a common example, is a mess in Hangul. It's readable, sometimes with a bit of effort, but completely obliterates certain sounds that have important meanings, or is forced to add other sounds where there simply is none in English (consonant consonant groupings in English end up rendered as consonant vowel consonant in many cases, usually with the all purpose ㅡ (eu) vowel). I've also long wondered how much of the verbal features of modern Korean is merely a reflection of written Hangul. Much like how English speakers will overemphasize the 't' in 'water' when the spoken form is really a soft 'd'. The hard coupling of spoken Korean to Hangul may help overemphasize certain language features that may not have existed in earlier forms. Despite all this there's an effort to try and adapt Hangul to languages with similar vowel consonant features. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cia-Cia_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cia-Cia_language If you think that's strange, regard Latin, Greek, Arabic and Chinese w/r to Western Europe, Eastern Europe & Russia, the Middle East and Central Asia and East Asia respectively. Some other interesting notes, modern Hangul is a little simpler than the original form. There's quite a few consonants that have been dropped, and various consonant clusters (many of which make more sense when transliterating foreign languages into Korean as noted above, so it's sad they're gone). However, this makes learning it far easier. It's alleged that King Sejong created and funded what we'd know today as a linguistic R&D program as a way of improving literacy and education in the country after a plague killed a great number of his subjects. The connection? A treatment for the plague was printed and disseminated throughout the country but the low literacy rate (you had to know how to read and speak Chinese to understand the information) resulted in low adoption of the treatment. However, for quite some time (a few hundred years) it was overcome by politics and never adopted as the official written form of the language, not really being standardized or formalized to fit the modern dialect until the early 20th century! It's really worthwhile to learn it if you travel to Korea, or even live in an area with a large Korean population. Why? Once you learn the names of a few foods, it's much easier to read them in Hangul and learning new words (and how to pronounce them) is much easier than learning them via transliteration.
comfuture 15y ago
안녕하세요
jonniekang 15y ago
Korean is actually one of the most easiest languages to learn in the world.
runn1ng 15y ago
I misread the title as "how to read Koran in 15 minutes". ....I would be quite interested in that.
zackattack 15y ago
This is amazing. Thanks for posting the link. You're awesome.
jarek 15y ago
There is a similar guide to hangul with information arranged in the shape of the periodic table of elements, the "periodic table of hangul": http://www.aboutletters.com/pfaq.html http://www.aboutletters.com/pfaq.html. I found it to be a reasonably handy reference that logically compiles all the information in one image as opposed to this guide's gradual introduction of vowels and consonants mixed in batches. The author no longer authorizes distribution of the image over the internet, however copies can be found with a google search.

514 points by rfreytag 15y ago

The other thing interesting about the Korean alphabet is that the symbols take "notches" also have the same mouth formation. The notch is an indication to use the same mouth shape, but to use a "harder" sound. So the G sound and K sound have a similar mouth shape, as well as the D sound and the T sound, the J and CH sounds. My understanding, also, is that there are no exceptions to the rules, so it makes it very easy to read and write, which is awesome.

guard-of-terra 15y ago
There are some exceptions. 입니다 is [imnida]. Complex vowels can be produced in various ways. There are dialectal things too, so I've heard. Still it is very straightforward.
- helpbygrace 15y ago
  that kind of irregular sounds is usually happened at final consonants to move smoothly to next letter.
- mansr 15y ago
  Another exception is 시 being pronounced [shi].
  - guard-of-terra 15y ago
    That's no more exception than st in german being pronounced [scht]. "It doesn't produce minimal pairs".
    - mansr 15y ago
      Whenever pronunciation of a letter depends on the surrounding context, you have an exception.
      - guard-of-terra 15y ago
        There is no way for a pronunciation to not depend on the surrounding context. You do not spell words letter by letter. Thus minimal pairs are the king.
Tsagadai 15y ago
There are exceptions to those rules, hundreds of them. ㅊ(chieut/치읓) as the bottom consonant has a really difficult and varying set of rules for different words, different consonants before and different consonants as the start of the next word. Take this word 청령리 (a large transit hub for intercity bus and train travel. The transliteration from that guide is Cheong-ryeong-ri which is completely wrong. It should really be transliterated closer to Cheon-nyeong-gi. If you say that word as that guide has shown you no one will have a clue where you want to go. I live in Seoul. Non-Korean speakers frequently struggle to tell taxi drivers or to get directions to three different places: 시정 (sijeong - city hall), 신촌 (sinchon - a district in the north) and 신천 (sincheon - a district in the south). First, anyone who hasn't learned 시 is closer to 'shi' than 'see' gets nowhere. Then there is the subtle difference between ㅓ and ㅗ; ㅓ is more like 'audio' than 'eo' and ㅗ is a short 'o' sound. These things take practice. The ㅈ in 시정 becomes more of a 'ch' sound than a 'j' sound. The difference is about the same as the difference in pronunciation between the 'ch' at the start of church to the 'ch' at the end of it in English. Hard to notice, but there is a change in most peoples pronunciation for that. There are people who have been here for years who still get a taxi to the wrong place every now and then. 15 minutes might be enough time to learn the symbols if you are an adult who can already read other languages. A week is more realistic for actually remembering them. A month of practice and you will probably be able to read what people write on bits of paper at a speed that allows them to listen and follow what you say. Learning alphabets isn't too hard but it isn't easy either (I learnt the Mon alphabet in a day with a good teacher).
- otoburb 15y ago
  When I was young, I had a problem learning to differentiante between the 'ㅓ' and 'ㅗ' sounds. My way of remembering was to think of 'ㅓ' as the weaker (i.e. less powerful) sound associated with "dumb" or "uh" (same pronunciation), and 'ㅗ' as the stronger sound associated with an exclamation of "oh!" (same as your short 'o' sound reference).

spullara 15y ago

I put together a cheat sheet a while ago: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spullara/2629936/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/spullara/2629936/ Not as entertaining but tries to show you how the various parts are derived from one another. Interesting that n is half of m.

ghiotion 15y ago

Wow. That is really neat. I've always believed that spoken languages that are constructed/contrived are doomed to failure (esperanto, klingon, etc). I'm not saying that Korean itself is contrived, but it's fascinating that the alphabet was created like that.

TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
It's successful because there was no better alternative. Before that you could basically use Chinese characters with similar sounds (horrendously inefficient and distorts meaning of the Chinese characters), or just write in Classical Chinese. This system gave Korean its own writing system, and a good, simple-to-learn one at that.
- joejohnson 15y ago
  The hangul script was also successful because it was a state-sponsored improvement over using the chinese characters for the Korean language. Sometimes it helps to have someone abruptly enforce adoption of a better method.
  - kijin 15y ago
    Interestingly, when the state tried to get Korean to adopt the new writing system in the 15th century, it failed miserably because of various political and ideological issues. Only later did Hangeul actually begin to gain popularity, and this happened organically.
  - w1ntermute 15y ago
    Not everyone supported it. Although King Sejong, who had it invented in the 1440s, was a big proponent, prominent Korean Confucian scholars opposed it on the basis that it would dilute the sway that Confucian/Chinese culture had on Korea and turn them into barbarians. The real reason was probably that by keeping the writing system so time-consuming to learn, they would be able to control the poor much beter. For example, you can read scholar Choi Manri's (a contemporary of Sejong) explanation of why he opposes hangul here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Man_Ri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Man_Ri By the way, there was an excellent South Korean historical TV drama that aired late last year called Tree With Deep Roots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_With_Deep_Roots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_With_Deep_Roots) that covered the creation of hangul by Sejong and the opposition of the entrenched nobility to its promulgation (links to 720p video and English subtitles are available if anyone's interested). In fact, hangul was banned by a subsequent king after peasants (who were previously illiterate because of the years it took to become educated in Chinese characters) made signs in hangul and started protesting outside his palace. It wasn't until the modernizing Gabo Reforms of 1894-96 that vernacular Korean replaced Classical Chinese as the official written language of the state. And even then, words of Sinitic origin (which makes up 60% of contemporary Korean vocabulary) continued to be written in Chinese characters, with hangul used only for native Korean words, similar to how Japanese is written to this day (although Japanese uses Chinese characters for many words of Japanese origin as well). It wasn't until the early 1990s that big Korean newspapers, such as the Chosun Ilbo, started dropping hanja from the majority of their writing (though it is still used in a few situations).

throwaway54-762 15y ago

Yup. I happen to be an American, English-only speaker, and a friend was able to teach me the Korean alphabet during highschool AP chemistry (oh, and I still managed to get a 5 on the exam). It's really that easy.

guard-of-terra 15y ago
Most alphabets are trivial. It is only latin that tends to be hard, especially french or english latin (german to lesser intent), because of loose correlation between letters and sounds. Cyrillic is pretty straightforward, for example.
- pmjordan 15y ago
  I wouldn't put English and French in the same category of phoneticism. English is all over the place[1], French pronunciation is fairly systematic. [1] Not that that's in any way surprising, considering its messy Saxon-Norman-Viking-... history.
  - luchs 15y ago
    French pronunciation might be okay, but it's definitely quite difficult the other way round because many words have some parts which just change how the rest is pronounced or have no sound at all.
  - JBiserkov 15y ago
    Ideally there is a one-to-one mapping between text and speech. To me at least French is more difficult in thespeech-to-text direction (because of all those mute letters at the end of most words esp. verb forms that sound the same parler, parlez, parlais, parlaient, parlai, parlé) while English is more difficult in the text-to-speech
    - WiseWeasel 15y ago
      English is very difficult to learn to pronounce from the writing, or to write from the pronunciation because the different words stem from a large number of roots, each with their own pronunciation and conjugation peculiarities. Writing in French is difficult to learn because there are many more verb conjugations and tenses, and nouns have often seemingly arbitrary sexes. The silent consonants are fairly consistent and systematic.

hsshah 15y ago

This is indeed surprisingly easy. Now, where's the cheat sheet for 'understanding' what we read (other than proper nouns)?!

sandimac 15y ago
yeah... that's a bit more difficult. i picked up the korean alphabet in an afternoon, and was able to read out loud almost any korean text put in front of me. after studying the language for a few more months, i was still only at a very low beginner level when it came to recognizing anything i read. i think it's one of the more difficult languages to learn.
- hsshah 15y ago
  That's what I feared. Unless you are willing to commit time/effort to really learn the language, I fear the usefulness of this is limited to impressing friends and staff at Korean restaurants.
helpbygrace 15y ago
Korean (letter) is easy. Korean (language) is quite difficult. There are many irregular syntax and postposition. Also, there are many rules for a prolonged sound.
- lifthrasiir 15y ago
  Modern Korean no longer distinguishes a prolonged sound at least in the written form. Virtually all words that cannot be set apart without a prolonged sound have been changed to those that can. For example, a short 이 ("teeth") and a long 이 ("two") are now homonym in most dialects of Korean; the former 이 has many synonyms like 이빨 or 치아 however, so they can be often distinguished without a context.

bsinger 15y ago

This kind of reminds me of the classic Tim Ferriss article: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn-but-not-master-any-language-in-1-hour-plus-a-favor/ http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn...

wheels 15y ago

People overestimate the difficulty in learning different alphabets (and the assumed difficulty of the languages which use them). I'm on vacation in Israel this week and learned the Hebrew alphabet with standard flash cards in 2 hours (incidentally by doing something similar to this post by remembering the names based on something the character looks like). At various points I've learned the Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets in a similar amount of time. The real difficulty is, naturally, actually learning the language. The additional burden of it using a separate regular alphabet is negligible in comparison.

TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
Yeah, alphabets are usually pretty easy to learn. I can read (and write) the two syllabic Japanese "alphabets" - really syllibaries - which only took a week or two to learn. Of course, you need to practise to get good at it.
usaar333 15y ago
Agreed. When you don't know the language, knowing the alphabet is pretty useless. In Israel I recall being able to read signs.. and have no idea what I was actually reading. On the other hand you do have languages like Chinese where learning the written language actually is the majority of the work. Spoken Chinese is probably one of the easier languages out there for a person coming from a random language.
- evmar 15y ago
  While visiting Israel I picked up the alphabet from the street signs and found it useful for identifying which sherut went to Jerusalem (their signs were in Hebrew only).
  - darklajid 15y ago
    That's interesting. I consider the street signs evil. Ignoring streets for which even the Israelis I know don't know how to pronounce the name (for example אבן גברויל which GMaps lists as Ibn Gabriol but ends up as something different, whenever you talk to anyone). Road signs in general wildy vary. The name 'Weizmann' (as in [1]) is generally butchered in latin script. The best form I found so far was in Acre and spelled 'Wiseman'. Often the signs just contain a transcript of the Hebrew word. I saw a couple of signs that spell out 'Nemal', which isn't particularly helpful unless you know that this is the Hebrew word for the port. Bottom line: The road signs here confuse the hell out of me. I'm amazed that they helped you learn the alphabet somehow. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann

bergie 15y ago

Cool! 15 minutes sounds about right. I learned it over a single pint on my last trip to Seoul. I can tell you navigating the city becomes easier when you start to understand signs like megchu (beer) and tsikin (chicken) :-) (sorry for the quick transliterations)

mynameishere 15y ago

You can learn to read Vietnamese much faster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet

jarek 15y ago
Only if you don't go cross-eyed from the diacritics and cross-tongued from the tones first...

barumrho 15y ago

I am not familiar with many languages, but something that is unique about Korean "alphabets" is that alphabets combine to form a character. This makes sentences more compact in appearance, but it also creates difficulty in creating fonts, since a single alphabet looks slightly different in combination with different alphabets. (For example, Gulim font, a standard sans-serif font, contains 49,284 glyphs according to this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Gulim. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Gulim.)

klodolph 15y ago
According to the web page, New Gulim includes all of CJK, for Koreans this means Hanja, which are thousands of Chinese characters that haven't really been used to write Korean since the 19th century. The actual Hangul (Korean syllabary) characters require about 30 consonants/clusters and 21 vowels/dipthongs which can appear in characters in 9 different layouts. It's much more work than the 26 latin characters, but most of the font design is going to be copy/paste. So you could say the purpose of New Gulim is not to create a "Korean font" in the sense that a font you can write Korean with, but rather the sense that Koreans can use it to write Korean mixed with Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic, and Greek characters with a unified design between scripts. That's a tall order.
- barumrho 15y ago
  Oops, forgot about the other character sets. But, I think properly designed fonts require a lot more than what you mentioned. According to this article, for Windows, it requires 11,172. (Second paragraph in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language_and_computers#Character_encodings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language_and_computers#C...)
- lifthrasiir 15y ago
  > It's much more work than the 26 latin characters, but most of the font design is going to be copy/paste. Not quite. While the minimal Hangul font design requires two sets of initial consonants, one set of vowels and two sets of final consonants (often called 2x1x2), it would be very quirky. Many bitmap fonts used the 8x4x8 design or its variant, the commercially available TrueType/OpenType fonts now have more than 30 sets of subtly differing glyphs. It is easier than drawing all 11,172+ glyphs but not much.

RandallBrown 15y ago

Well this explains how my Korean friend in college could type touch type in Korean and English on an American keyboard. I didn't know that Korean had an alphabet, I thought it was pictograms or whatever.

ineedtosleep 15y ago
Your initial thought was partially right. Though it's not used as often these days, Korean does have hanja[1] which uses Chinese characters. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja
helpbygrace 15y ago
before Korean was invented, Chinese letters are used in Korea. Korean was invented based on the form of mouth that need to speak that sound. For example to say 'ㄱ', your mouth should be form like that. Not all Korean letter was made based on this concept but King Sejong who is known as inventor of Korean tried to make the public learn letter and write letter quickly, that requires easily understandable form.
kijin 15y ago
Modern Korean has 24 alphabets, plus 2 letters (ㅐ,ㅔ) each of which is technically a combination of two other letters but usually treated as a single letter. Guess how many keys the American keyboard reserves for English alphabets? 26. No need to shift keys around or rely on complicated modifier keys, unlike even some European keyboards. Korean alphabet + American keyboard = a match made in heaven.
otoburb 15y ago
What makes Korean touch typists really fast is the semi-regular symbol construction. Unlike an English keyboard (whether Dvorak or Qwerty), the Hanja consonants are primarily on the left while the vowels are on the right. So you typically have an alternating typing rhythm which can make typing extremely fast. Dvorak, to a similar extent, seems to be closest to mimicking this style of typing (although I hear Colemak is better with the keystroke distribution).

WildUtah 15y ago

Next I want to learn how to read and write the kanji in fifteen minutes. Okay, oaky. I'm willing to invest as long as twenty minutes.

MichaelGG 15y ago

Some scripts are surprisingly easy to pick up. If anyone is interested in the Japanese scripts (hiragana/katakan), this book[1] will truly teach them to you in 6 hours, total. I started reading it, and thought it moronic, but as I started writing a review of why it sucked, I realised that I could recall everything perfectly... 1: http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kana-Reading-Japanese-Syllabaries/dp/0824831640/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335218962&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kana-Reading-Japanese-Syll...

dbh937 15y ago

This is why I love Hacker News. Even though this doesn't really have anything to do with startups or technology in general, it's still something that interests the types of people who read Hacker News. One of the big reasons I love HN is the community that contributes to it.

pm90 15y ago

Hindi is also a pretty straightforward language; by which I mean that the written alphabet corresponds exactly to the sounds made when speaking it. When I was in Korea, I used to write korean words in hindi (I did not know the korean alphabet then) because transliterating to english would screw up the pronunciation and unless you get the pronunciation exactly right, the locals just don't understand what you are saying.

codyrobbins 15y ago
Hey, would you be kind enough to email me? My address is in my profile. I’ve been looking for a Hindi speaker of Korean for a while. I’d love to ask you a few questions if you have a moment!
deleted 15y ago
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codyrobbins 15y ago

Having an alphabet, as it does, Korean indeed isn’t hard to learn to read and write. The difficulty is learning how to pronounce it properly—it has a number of distinct consonants that are treated as the same consonant in most other languages and that therefore are extremely difficult for non-native speakers to distinguish and produce properly. For example, it has three distinct unvoiced velar stops [1] which are all considered the same sound in English: normal [k], aspirated [kʰ], and faucalized [k͈]. We use both the normal and aspirated [2] unvoiced velar stops in English as positional allophones [3], meaning we consider them the same sound but they’re actually different and we distinguish between them unconsciously depending on where the sound occurs in a word. For example, /k/ is aspirated in word-initial position in words like cam but unaspirated after word-initial /s/ in words like scam. If you listen closely enough you realize that you turbulently expire a lot of air after the c in cam but don’t do so in scam. Despite using both phones [4] in English, you consider them more or less the same hard k sound—if you pronounce cam with an unaspirated /k/ it may sound slightly odd but you’ll still consider it the same word cam. The problem is that in Korean doing so would result in two different words—so it makes it hard for English speakers to perceive distinct words in Korean that differ this way, and to pronounce the correct word that they intend when talking. This is true for many languages because phoneme inventories never overlap, but it’s especially difficult for English learners of Korean because Korean has a third /k/ sound—the faucalized [5] one—and it doesn’t occur at all in English. I know phonologists—people who are trained in the study of human speech categories—who have an extremely difficult time discerning between [k] and [k͈]. Peter Ladefoged, one of the world’s foremost phoneticians, has a fantastic website to accompany his phonetics textbook and it has recordings of all the sounds known to be produced in human languages. You can listen to the distinctions between the Korean consonants here: http://phonetics.ucla.edu/appendix/languages/korean/korean.html http://phonetics.ucla.edu/appendix/languages/korean/korean.h... The /k/ sounds I’ve been discussing are the third row down (weight of measure, rope, and large). As an English speaker try to hear a difference between how the consonant is pronounced—it’s extremely difficult to notice. Our sensitivity to these phonemic distinctions develops at an extremely early age: by one month old infants already begin to stop distinguishing between different sounds that their language slots into the same category as the same “sound” [6]. Infants don’t even babble at this age never mind produce or understand adult speech, but they have already stopped noticing certain differences in speech—that’s how deeply ingrained the way we perceive and produce speech is, and why it’s almost impossible to speak a non-native language without an accent. (I am only tangentially familiar with Korean phonology so I might be getting some of the details slightly wrong here—please correct me if I’ve misstated anything.) ### [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unvoiced_velar_stop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unvoiced_velar_stop [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics) [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faucalized_voice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faucalized_voice [6] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/171/3968/303 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/171/3968/303 & http://home.fau.edu/lewkowic/web/Eimas%20infant%20speech%20discrim%20Science%201971.pdf http://home.fau.edu/lewkowic/web/Eimas%20infant%20speech%20d...

kitsune_ 15y ago

I've just returned from a 15 days trip to Korea. Being able to read Hangul was helpful, especially when trying to read menus, but in most places, road and subway signs were bilingual (English & Korean). In many ways, the country seemed to be light years ahead of other places (I'm from Switzerland). By the way, Korea is absolutely worth a visit. I think I'm infatuated with it right now. In the short time I got to know a couple of very wonderful people.

donw 15y ago
I'm guessing you were in Seoul? Down in Daejeon, nothing was in English, and my Hangul-reading ability was not the best.
wingerlang 15y ago
Did you know the meaning of the words that you translated from writings to "words"? I mean, I could read korean letters and words if I know the alphabet (somewhat) but I dont know what it means anyways.
- bane 15y ago
  There's a surprising amount that's in English, and survival words are relatively simple. e.g. 화장실 - bathroom. You don't need to make a complicated sentence when asking where one is. Just 화장실? is enough and everybody knows you're a foreigner anyways and will know what you mean. Hello, goodbye, thank you, your welcome, are similarly easy. Food words are relatively simple and regular and if you drink alcohol there's relatively few to learn about.
bane 15y ago
I agree, Korea is sadly way underrated as a tourist destination. Amazingly fun, safe, tons to do (generally speaking). Everything from hiking to nightclubs. Ridiculously good public transport, fun stuff for tourists to do, interesting culture, amazing food. I've been there quite a few times and have absolutely loved every minute there.

bane 15y ago

Hangul is an astonishingly good alphabet. If it has a problem it's that it's too tightly coupled to its host language. as codyrobbins already alluded to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3881388 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3881388 it expresses the particulars of Korean extremely well, while only so-so mapping to the particulars of other languages. English, as a common example, is a mess in Hangul. It's readable, sometimes with a bit of effort, but completely obliterates certain sounds that have important meanings, or is forced to add other sounds where there simply is none in English (consonant consonant groupings in English end up rendered as consonant vowel consonant in many cases, usually with the all purpose ㅡ (eu) vowel). I've also long wondered how much of the verbal features of modern Korean is merely a reflection of written Hangul. Much like how English speakers will overemphasize the 't' in 'water' when the spoken form is really a soft 'd'. The hard coupling of spoken Korean to Hangul may help overemphasize certain language features that may not have existed in earlier forms. Despite all this there's an effort to try and adapt Hangul to languages with similar vowel consonant features. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cia-Cia_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cia-Cia_language If you think that's strange, regard Latin, Greek, Arabic and Chinese w/r to Western Europe, Eastern Europe & Russia, the Middle East and Central Asia and East Asia respectively. Some other interesting notes, modern Hangul is a little simpler than the original form. There's quite a few consonants that have been dropped, and various consonant clusters (many of which make more sense when transliterating foreign languages into Korean as noted above, so it's sad they're gone). However, this makes learning it far easier. It's alleged that King Sejong created and funded what we'd know today as a linguistic R&D program as a way of improving literacy and education in the country after a plague killed a great number of his subjects. The connection? A treatment for the plague was printed and disseminated throughout the country but the low literacy rate (you had to know how to read and speak Chinese to understand the information) resulted in low adoption of the treatment. However, for quite some time (a few hundred years) it was overcome by politics and never adopted as the official written form of the language, not really being standardized or formalized to fit the modern dialect until the early 20th century! It's really worthwhile to learn it if you travel to Korea, or even live in an area with a large Korean population. Why? Once you learn the names of a few foods, it's much easier to read them in Hangul and learning new words (and how to pronounce them) is much easier than learning them via transliteration.

comfuture 15y ago

안녕하세요

jonniekang 15y ago

Korean is actually one of the most easiest languages to learn in the world.

runn1ng 15y ago

I misread the title as "how to read Koran in 15 minutes". ....I would be quite interested in that.

zackattack 15y ago

This is amazing. Thanks for posting the link. You're awesome.

jarek 15y ago

There is a similar guide to hangul with information arranged in the shape of the periodic table of elements, the "periodic table of hangul": http://www.aboutletters.com/pfaq.html http://www.aboutletters.com/pfaq.html. I found it to be a reasonably handy reference that logically compiles all the information in one image as opposed to this guide's gradual introduction of vowels and consonants mixed in batches. The author no longer authorizes distribution of the image over the internet, however copies can be found with a google search.