3 ms·
Yes, Korea (Hangul) really is about this easy to learn. It takes about a week of an hour a day to remember everything well enough to be able to sound out Korean
by bane 11y ago
Yes, Korea (Hangul) really is about this easy to learn. It takes about a week of an hour a day to remember everything well enough to be able to sound out Korean words easily (and it's especially fun when you find English loan words).
Depending where you live, you might not use it very often, but it's a neat skill to pick up.
It also does that weird hack to your brain where you start looking at signs and instead of just seeing a picture of the sign, your brain almost starts involuntarily looking for things to read (almost like in some kind of unkillable background thread). Since it'll be a new writing system, your brain won't do it as quickly, but you'll never be able to look at ㄱ and not immediately have your brain turn that into a 'g/k' sound, but it'll happen kind of slowly compared to your native script and you can "feel" the thread working.
- keerthiko 11y agoYes this! Like many Indians, I was raised bilingual on completely different scripts (Latin alphabet and Malayalam) and learned the Hindi (Sanskrit) script when I was really young too. I learned to read Hangul in the first 2-3 days of wandering the streets of Seoul aimlessly when I stayed there for a month, just trying to read every neon sign, advert and train/bus stop I came across. The thread works at slightly different paces for each of them because of how much I use each one, really feeling like it's all about cache hits and memory bus limitations. It's pretty interesting to meta-think about.
- bane 11y agoIt's so weird because of how involuntary it is. I notice that on signs in languages I can sound out, my gaze will stick on the sign until I can "read" it, without me wanting it to happen. The first few days in a new country can be kind of exhausting simply because of this effect.