Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes
ryanestrada.com
ryanestrada.com
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.
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.
Hangul was originally highly phonemic, but a modern reform is much more hybrid ("morphophonemic") mainly because it's much easier and relatively more stable in the long term. Double letters, for example, are used when a syllable coda (jongseong) affects the following syllable onset (choseong). Such cases can be quite regularly described as having two codas, where the first coda remains in the original syllable and the second coda is merged to the following syllable in a specific way. The actual difficulty in the Korean language is much more subtle than that in my knowledge.
What's interesting is, in some places those inconsistencies are acknowledged and even celebrated annually in the form of spelling bee competitions. They make zero sense for any of the phonetic languages including Korean.
For a native english speaker, I suspect Hangul/Korean is impressive because of its simplicity (and the popularity of K-pop and k-drama also help to an extent) in writing with a smaller alphabet compared to the relative madness of the English language.
Loaned or not, the «bite», «meet», «meat», «serene», «mate», «out», «boot», «boat», «stone», «day», «they», «boy», «law», «knew», «dew», «know» were pronounced differently before and after the great vowel shift.
The GVS was a gradual process that encompassed several centuries and – in some dialects of English in Britain – the remnants of the pre-GVS pronunciation have persisted into today.
… for now in the 21st century. There is no guarantee the current spelling will accurately reflect the pronunciation in the 23rd century.
Pronunication and spelling inevitable diverge over time in nearly any sufficiently widely used language due to languages being living things. People lament the perceived absurdities of the English spelling, yet they do not realise that it is a far more common problem across many languages. Take Tibetan as another and perhaps an even more extreme example where the spelling today is fixed to the pronunciation that existed in the 11th century, a millenium ago. The Icelandic spelling is also very complex and is not reflective of the modern pronunication. French, Burmese and Thai are susceptible to the same problem of varying extents as well. English receives the majority of the criticism by virtue of being more widespread than the other languages that face the same problem.
There are pretty much only two ways to deal with the problem: regularly purge obsolete/changed phonetic rules/encodings from the writing system, which will result in a loss of historical continuity over a long period of time where future generations will not be able to directly read texts written by their ancestors, or keep the spelling intact and allow pronunciation to depart from the spelling in the future.
The only solution that is immune to the spelling / pronunciation dilemma is a logographic script albeit in a different way. The most glaring example is, of course, the Chinese traditional characters. The phonetic quality today is so vastly different from their pronunciation of Old Chinese, Middle Chinese and multiple modern Chinese languages that it is somewhat amusing to see names of historically significant people of the ancient past to be spelled out using the modern Mandarin pronunciation. It is a convention and a common denominator, though.
So the logographic scripts offer a semantic continuity solution to the writing system problem whilst allowing the pronunciation to evolve independently.
Granted, the grammar will also diverge at some point as well but, as the natural language processing (early word2vec, the Bayesian topic model, BERT etc) has demonstrated, the grammatic markers in the writing can be safely ignored to a large extent – at the expense of losing nuances of the colloquial speech. Yet, with a logographic writing system, the semantic meaning and the context will remain largely retained for a far longer time compared to an alphabet based writing system.
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.
It's not though: it's a unique in that it's both alphabetic and a syllabary at the same time, and there's nothing quite else like it. Judging it by how phonetic it is kind of beside the point, and given that it's been 600 years since King Sejong came up with the system, it's held up much better than many other writing systems (looking at you, English).
To an anglophone ear, [paʔ] and [baʔ] are indistinguishable - we also care more about aspiration than voicing. So it's odd to describe this, in English, as "a very big difference that is implied".
It's just until early 1900s that a "nationalist" (SiKyeong Ju) decided to use the "phonetic alphabet" into a primary writing system and revamped the system to be focused on words to be identifiable, rather than following the pronunciation. hangul now is just like equivalent of using a modded Phonetics alphabet that made each words identifiable. It's not representing the actual pronunciation, nor the actual pronunciation of the word. That's also the reason why the hanja (= kanji or "Chinese characters" or whatever your country calls it) was around until late 90s.
If you think Korean grammar is crazy, It's all thanks to him.
(Also, for reference, we say "Chinese characters" because that's what every country calls them. Hanja is just the Korean reading of 漢字. Kanji is the Japanese reading of 漢字. 漢字 means "Chinese characters".)
I observed that English shares that quality with Korean, and English speakers are not even able to hear the difference between [pap̚] and [bap̚], making this an odd choice to exhibit as a "very big difference" which will, by its lack of representation in the writing system, confuse English-speaking Westerners. It's a difference they can't perceive; why would they be confused over the fact that two identical sounds are both written the same way?
I never would have properly guessed the pronunciation of the Serbian city of Subotica had I not seen the name rendered in Cyrillic: Суботица. "C" in South Slavic Latin script has no relation to "C" in English.
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"
But I can still ask: are there documented cases where a language was intentionally obfuscated?
There is no natural ordering for sounds, so it's true that the ultimate reason for an alphabetic sequence can't exist. But then, since the concept is ill-founded anyway, that's not what anyone is ever talking about when they talk about the reason for an alphabetic sequence.
It is obvious that any fully original writing system will be ordered in large part arbitrarily. But an explanation is called for when an unoriginal writing system puts its symbols in a strange order. Even where the writing system is autochthonous, but the concept of writing is not, the system is likely to be conventionally ordered, as in the case of the Japanese syllabary, which conforms to the traditional ordering of Sanskrit.
Thaana is overtly strange, as you can see in the wikipedia entry:
> The first nine letters (h–v) are derived from the Arabic numerals, whereas the next nine (m–d) were the local Indic numerals. The remaining letters for loanwords (z–ch) and Arabic transliteration are derived from phonetically similar native consonants by means of diacritics (like nuqta), with the exception of y, which is of unknown origin.
> The order of the Thaana alphabet (ha, shaviyani, noonu, raa, baa, etc.) does not follow the order of other Indic scripts or of the Arabic script.
Do we know how the order ultimately came about, and what it was originally based on? I don’t mean “because earlier alphabets had that order”, I mean an explanation in terms of the characters of the (earlier) alphabet themselves. I’m genuinely curious. I don’t remember having seen such an explanation.
That aside, my original point wasn’t to suggest that the Latin alphabet is similar in how its order came about to the Thaana alphabet. I’m well aware that it is based on an ancestry of earlier alphabets and their order. I merely made the point that the order does look rather arbitrary as well, meaning one shouldn’t necessarily expect a historically grown alphabet to exhibit an order that makes particular sense in terms of its characters.
It is still a matter of debate, however the order in which Proto-Sinaic scripts and the Phoenician alphabets laid letters out is thought to have been based on the acrophonic principle, where the first sound of the word that represented the object or concept depicted by the letter determined its place in the alphabet. Later alphabetic and abiguda writing systems have followed an earlier lead.
There have also been suggestions that it may have been influenced by the order of Egyptian hieroglyphic signs, whilst others propose that it could be based on a mnemonic sequence to make it easier to remember.
The short answer is that… we may never find out why it happened to be that way.
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.
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.
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 :-)
Learning interesting things again got me motivated and out of that rut.
- King Sejong, inventor of Hangul
It's learning what to say when you are faced with these characters that is difficult.
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
Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935042 (July 23, 2015 — 111 points, 29 comments)
It looks like it should be pronounced “gim bob”
I must be missing something.
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.
It is true that a good portion of vocabulary are derived from Chinese words (hence they /can/ be spelled with Chinese characters), and maybe 30+ years ago it was common practice to have newspapers and textbooks writing complex words in Chinese characters. This is no longer the case, and pretty much all texts these days spell everything with the Korean alphabet. The practice of learning non-simplified Chinese characters of course is still common among Koreans for several reasons.
I knew the Simplified Chinese (commonly used in Mainland China) was pushed by the RPC government to replace Traditional Chinese. Did something similar happen in Korea?
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.
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.
I'd buy the analogy if they forced people to learn classical chinese