
Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes - Tomte
http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/20461267965/learn-to-read-korean-in-15-minutes?resubmit=hn
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quibit
If you want to actually learn Korean, check out this site. [1] An American
knowing no Korean moved to Korea and meticulously documented everything he
learned, and this website was the result. It's an incredibly thorough study
into Korean.

[1] [http://www.howtostudykorean.com/](http://www.howtostudykorean.com/)

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ilurk
Anything similar for Japanese or Chinese?

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jzelinskie
Tae Kim's work is probably the equivalent for Japanese [0]. I think his
"complete guide" is still a work in progress, but his grammar guide is pretty
much the defacto free resource.

[0]:
[http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/](http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/)

~~~
Nadya
I actually suggest imabi.net over Tae Kim depending on how you want to define
"learning the language".

Tae Kim is a great introductory guide to Japanese and is something I often
hand to beginners. But for anyone who wants to _seriously_ study the language,
imabi.net is on an entirely different level.

[0] [http://imabi.net](http://imabi.net)

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bane
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.

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keerthiko
Yes 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
It'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.

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chernushka
He did the same with Russian a while back.

[http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/97607943779/learn-t...](http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/97607943779/learn-
to-read-russian-in-15-minutes-i-did-this)

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agumonkey
Fastest decomplexification I ever felt. Before that Korean was like Chinese,
and now it's as easy as Korean.

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lfowles
Free PDF for learning Korean:
[http://www.koreanfromzero.com/](http://www.koreanfromzero.com/)

I've heard a lot of good things for the author's other series Japanese From
Zero.

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matthewrudy
This is a great start. But there is more to it, if you wanna learn. Eg. Double
final consonants 닭, and all the "Consonant assimilation" stuff.

The Korean Wiki Project has a more indepth look.
[http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/Learn_hangeul](http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/Learn_hangeul)

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panglott
The Korean script is fantastic, yes, one of the few designed to effectively
promote popular literacy. But you're only going to learn to read Korean in 15
minutes if you already speak Korean ;) Otherwise, you'll have to learn to
speak Korean (at least, learn the phonology of Korean) as you learn to read
it, which will take more than 15 minutes.

~~~
digitalsushi
This was still a fantastic little primer - in the tech field, I think we all
know a few people that know katakana and hiragana well enough to impress their
friends by mentally sounding out an english cognate - "hey friends, this is a
pharmacy up here" \- the first 1% looks like magic to the rest of us.

~~~
Glide
Well... Taking Japanese in high school will do that to you. Hiragana and
katakana are the first things you go over and it took a good part of the first
year.

Korean is simpler by far. Just a couple weekends of looking at the rules and
what they do. My problem is that I can't actually form the sounds in my head
fast enough in order to know what the words mean.

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jdeisenberg
Excellent work condensing the alphabet into a single fun-to-read comic.
Shameless self-promotion:
[http://langintro.com/kintro](http://langintro.com/kintro) ; much slower
paced, with exercises and other stuff.

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melling
I've got a site that has some basic Spanish grammar.

[http://thespanishsite.com/spanish/grammar](http://thespanishsite.com/spanish/grammar)

[http://thespanishsite.com](http://thespanishsite.com)

I'd like to repurpose it to cover the basics for several languages. With all
the localization, it's handy to have a quick reference.

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ddoolin
Plug: If you're learning Korean and have questions or just want to chat with
other people in Korean and are familiar with IRC, #korean and #learnkorean on
snoonet (irc.snoonet.org) always have people around who are also learning
and/or willing to help others.

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titanix2
Too bad Korean is not written in mixed script (hanja + hangul) anymore. It is
incredibly easy to understand texts and to focus on learning grammar rules
once you have a signifiant Chinese character knowledge.

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ddoolin
Not regularly but it is still mixed, particularly in literature. People still
learn Hanja for benefit, albeit relatively minor.

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NoMoreNicksLeft
I thought those were only used for street/place names, and sometimes business
cards for family names?

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1arity
Awesome. My name in Korean ( sort of )
[http://imgur.com/BelRtBC](http://imgur.com/BelRtBC)

Ryan is a genius. This really works!

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defen
Should be 오 at the end there

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1arity
Nice! Cool. :)

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fernando_moon
I've developed a beloved app to learn Korean

[http://get.egg-convo.com](http://get.egg-convo.com)

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thatusertwo
I lived in Korea for awhile, I still seem to remember the sounds of the
letters, this was a good refresher.

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nthState
This is really great! Thanks for posting

