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Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes
- latchkey 3y agoDiscussions on similar submissions: Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935042 (July 23, 2015 — 111 points, 29 comments)
- wodenokoto 3y agoI don't think learning to map characters to alphabet letters is hard. I'm sure there are written languages in use that only have vowels and consonant but are still extremely complex, but generally what we see here is just mapping a known set of shapes to a new set of shapes. It's learning what to say when you are faced with these characters that is difficult.
- httpz 3y agoInterestingly, that "rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are", this totally works with Korean too.
- niux 3y agoSimilar discussion: [How to read Korean in 15 minutes](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3880837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3880837)
- sohkamyung 3y agoI learned Korean from a tourist guide book many years ago. After a few days, I could read and pronounce the train stops to figure out which stop to get off.
- redwood 3y agoIt is surprisingly easy to learn how to read the phonetic nature of the language
- lifthrasiir 3y agoKorean language is actually a very deep in terms of orthographic depth. Hangul makes an approximated pronunciation really easy, but doesn't and in fact can't catch the full phonetic variation of Korean language.
- vsnf 3y agoJapanese is the same way, the kana's don't capture the up/down tones that many words posses.
- Aardwolf 3y agoBut doesn't Korean also have 40k+ other characters to learn? Since Korean is the K in CJK
- contrarian1234 3y agoUnfortunately Hanja stopped being taught in the recent decades and it's now rarely used
- wk_end 3y ago“Unfortunately”. As someone knee-deep in the process of learning the J in CJK, I have a perverse fondness for the 漢字, but that largely must be Stockholm syndrome.
- noduerme 3y agoInteresting. I'm curious why you think it's unfortunate... mind-expansion?
- decafninja 3y agoSome elderly arch-conservatives bemoan the decline of Hanja use in Korean society. I’m sure many academics also feel the same. I see this sort of similar as some conservative Catholics bemoaning not doing Latin Mass. One reason I’ve heard is that many Korean words (same for Japanese) have roots in Chinese and not knowing the Hanja representation means you lose some of that connection. Whether that connection is really worth anything of practical value, is a matter of debate. I lean towards…no.
- contrarian1234 3y agoI don't think that's a great analogy. Maybe if Latin was used in all spheres of life into the early 20th century I'd buy the analogy if they forced people to learn classical chinese
- contrarian1234 3y ago
- neom 3y agoYou can do that because it's on purpose. King Sejong wanted every Korean to be literate. "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul
- Hamuko 3y agoSeems like a better system than the Japanese one of cramming 2000+ kanji into students in the span of nine years.
- Alex4386 3y agoWell, That's only after late 90s. Before that, hanja (equivalent of kanji in Japanese) was used in news, official documents and etc. alongside the hangul. You need to know hanja to say out what it read
- AndrewOMartin 3y agoThis is just the myth of the rockstar 10X alphabet learner.
- dguest 3y agoI've also heard the opposite claim about other languages: they were intentionally obfuscated to keep the lower classes illiterate. I won't say which because I'm not about to cite hearsay to criticize a major world language. But I can still ask: are there documented cases where a language was intentionally obfuscated?
- resolutebat 3y agoThe ordering of letters in Thaana, the Maldivian writing system, is (as far as linguists can tell) completely random and the working hypothesis is that this was done intentionally to make it more cryptic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaana
- sva_ 3y ago> A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days - King Sejong, inventor of Hangul
- feverzsj 3y agoKorean alphabet only has 24 letters, but they all look very similar, also much more indistinguishable than Katakana.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoA geometric design of Hangul is thought to be intentional, as it was meant to be written in any conceivable writing tool. Of course there are also variant glyphs that are more suitable for brushes and other mediums, which are much less geometric.
- monkey_monkey 3y agoThis site helped me immensely when first starting to learn to read Hangul http://letslearnhangul.com/ http://letslearnhangul.com/
- StimDeck 3y agoFunny that this answered my questions about the comic version so quickly. Was trying to resolve 김밥 starting and ending with a b sound in the second syllable.
- nurumaik 3y agoI read this several years ago and was so hyped about learning korean language. Oh, characters have almost perfect phonetical mapping, I thought. How cool. Then I started really learning korean and found out that while mappings are indeed very precise, korean phonetics are very different from languages I know. Only after several months I managed to pronounce what I read properly and write what I hear
- jhbadger 3y agoWhile learning to read an alphabet isn't at all the same as learning to read the actual language, I strongly encourage learning an alphabet if possible before visiting somewhere -- even if you don't know the language written in it, it is often possible at least in places like Greece and Cyrillic-using nations to understand a lot of street signs and shop names which often have names recognizable to English speakers if you can get past the alphabet issue.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoAn interesting thing, I learned to phonetically read Cyrillic many years ago and still mostly can read it even if I don't know the meaning of most words, and one day I was looking at something someone wrote in Greek and realized I could read it! I had no idea that Cyrillic was derived from the Greek alphabet, it was pretty surprising to look at something that should look like Klingon and to just spontaneously know what it says.
- anotheruser13 3y agohttps://www.pbs.org/weta/faceofrussia/reference/cyrillic.html https://www.pbs.org/weta/faceofrussia/reference/cyrillic.htm...
- sfmike 3y agoif you want to get meta learn some han zi and then go to japan and read the kanji and trip out 買一送一
- mettamage 3y agoI second this. Being able to pronounce names in Greece helped me a lot in communicating certain things while I was there
- bschne 3y agoSeconded! As an add-on to just navigating things, my native language is German, and when I first learned to read Cyrillic I was extremely surprised to realize how many words in Russian are similar to German. It's not like you get reading comprehension "for free", but I understand more than I would have expected given the totally different alphabet.
- StimDeck 3y agoI can’t figure out how to make my favorite Korean word work; 김밥 (gimbap/kimbap). It looks like it should be pronounced “gim bob” I must be missing something.
- neom 3y agoWell 김밥 is a weird word in Korea even amoung Koreans. Gim bob is closer to how I hear people from Daejeon or Daegu say it. In Seoul it's closer to Gimbap, and those who also speak English usually pronounce it Kimbap but I'm not sure if that's for my sake or how they actually say it.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoYou have just discovered a difference between a morpheme and phoneme! :-) Korean ㅂ is a single morpheme (smallest unit of meaning) that can be realized as multiple phonemes (smallest unit of linguistically meaningful sound), here /p/ in a word initial or syllable final position or /b/ in other syllable initial positions, but the end of /p/ for the final ㅂ is not clearly indicated (applosive). Korean speakers mix them all the way without realizing that, just like other languages. English distinguishes /b/ and /p/ as different morphemes instead, so it's natural that an English approximation uses different characters for them.
- Brajeshwar 3y agoThis is a weird and nice find for me. I'm going on a tad tangent and a bit of a story. I'm from an international border state in India. I grew up studying a part of our local language[1] written in an Indian-specific script[2], but now it has reverted to the original script that has existed since 500-600AD. Surprisingly, when I visited my hometown about 10 years after I left, the first thing I noticed was that the young people could speak and converse in Korean! Right now, reading from the comic tutorial, I can understand why -- they have similar ideas. I never learned our local script properly; perhaps, now, I can read both and try to learn. I have heard people say that our local script is super easy to learn, and almost everyone, old and young, knows it. Perhaps these similarities help the people from that region to easily tune in to Korean media and speak and understand the language. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitei_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitei_script 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_alphabet
- em-bee 3y agowhen i traveled to south korea several years ago, i managed to learn the letters mostly from reading the roadsigns that were both in latin and korean. then i patched up a typing tutor program where i replaced the images for the latin letters with korean letters based on the position they had on the keyboard for the korean input system i had installed. after a few weeks i could type korean text by listening to someone, and having them confirm that the written text was correct. this was very helpful when someone wanted to tell me a name or an address, especially with kids who had basic reading skills, but could not yet write themselves. still didn't learn any korean language though. maybe a few words that i have since forgotten
- asyx 3y agoHangul is really only impressive if you're a native English speaker. It's probably somewhere between German and French in terms of ease of use and nothing special in that regard. Of course the cultural bubble of Korea includes Chinese languages and Japanese so the bar to be considered a simple writing system is incredibly low. But every single alphabet would meet those expectations. Amongst writing systems that use alphabets, Hangul is probably in the middle. A lot of the difficulty of reading Korean comes from double letters (when you have 4 letters in a syllable) where it's not necessarily clear which one to pronounce, diphthongs that lost their original pronunciation so the spelling changed a lot., letters at the end of a syllable get reduced down to a smaller set of sounds and the fact that Korean as a language cares more about aspiration than voicing resulting in, for a western ear, very minor differences that are explicitly expressed in the writing system (ㅂ vs ㅍ) and very big differences that are implied (밥 is [pap̚] but 보리밥 is [poɾibap̚]). I like that people get excited about languages but it's kinda nuts how the English speaking Internet celebrates Hangul as this genius invention of a writing system that makes perfect sense when it is just an averagely well maintained alphabetical writing system.
- nightlyherb 3y agoDisclaimer: I'm a Korean native speaker. It is interesting to see a perspective of someone who seems to have studied multiple languages. I think it would be useful to clarify what is meant by "writing system". The term may refer to the alphabet or the orthography of a language. (or other things that's out of the scope here) In the context of "Hangul hype", what is being discussed is usually about the alphabet, or, at least that is how I understand it. I do think Hangul as an alphabet is pretty intuitive and is modularized into components that compose well. On the other hand, Korean orthography doesn't really seem to be the easiest to learn and the complexity has bled into writing and pronouncing Hangul, as in written Korean. I don't have experience with languages other than English to compare with, but if someone says Korean orthography is in the middle of the camp I'd buy that. > Korean as a language cares more about aspiration than voicing resulting in, for a western ear, very minor differences that are explicitly expressed in the writing system and very big differences that are implied That's a really interesting point. I think it has something to do with pronunciation more than a writing system. For example I can't disambiguate the pronunciation of "밥" from that of the last syllable in "보리밥". I've been told they're different.
- poulpy123 3y ago*learn to transliterate korean in 15 mn
- bufferoverflow 3y ago*learn to pronounce Korean letters in 15 min
- risfriend 3y agoI've become lazy after google translate app started translating from camera directly without even taking pictures. I've purchased online some Chinese products in past with not a letter of English on them but was able to read in seconds with Translate and camera.
- yakkomajuri 3y agoLearning Hangul got me out of a rut when the pandemic started. I was very unmotivated and decided I needed to shake things up so spent an evening with a case of beer writing a program in Go (a language I hadn't used before at the time) to help me practice Hangul. I don't remember a thing now, but I could indeed read it very consistently after just a few hours. Learning interesting things again got me motivated and out of that rut.
- p0w3n3d 3y agoWhen learning, it's always good to make connections to things you already know. However I showed it to my daughter who is learning Korean, and there are some flaws. I mean at least with the EEH OOH and other wovels. Too hard for me to explain, as I can't read Korean at all.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoI would say learn Hangul in 15 min, not Korean in 15 min.
- phyzome 3y agoShould be "sound out", but great breakdown and mnemonics.
- decafninja 3y agoI might be biased as I’m Korean myself, but written Korean is probably the easiest of the East Asian languages to read if for no other reason than that you don’t have to memorize hundreds to a thousand+ Chinese characters as in Chinese or Japanese to become functionally literate. Chinese characters (called Hanja) are still used here and there in Korea but they are very rare and you don’t need to know them at all to function. Versus Japan where knowing Kanji is pretty much necessary.
- idontknowifican 3y agowasnt it created to do this on purpose?
- decafninja 3y agoYes, but if I recall my personal life correctly, there were many holdouts of Hanja use as recently as the 1980s and 1990s. I remember seeing my dad’s newspapers were full of Chinese characters and were nearly unreadable for me. Hanja was also heavily taught while I was in grade school. Now, I don’t think it is, or at least nowhere near to the same extent? There are still people (mostly elderly arch-conservatives) that bemoan the decline of Hanja use in Korean society, much like how some conservative Catholics bemoan not having Latin Mass. Kind of like the Greek vs. Latin discussion in that recent thread on the Byzantine Empire, even after Hangul was invented, knowing Hanja was probably a sign of being educated, elite, or part of the nobility. Nowadays no one cares other than as a curiosity.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bouncycastle 3y agoBest way to learn Korean is to learn to read Hangul first. Romanization of Korean is misleading, and leads to pronunciation mistakes. For example, 부산 is romanized to Busan, but the actual pronunciation is more like Pusan, which is a p with less aspiration than the English p. However, a Korean speaker will still understand if you said Pusan with an English accent, rather than Busan. The comic also missed some details, as there are many more sound changes on certain consonants when combined together, However, those could be introduced later as you progress. Definitely cannot be done in 15 min if you want to master all :-)
- notum 3y agoIt took 20 minutes to load that website.