
How to read Korean in 15 minutes - rfreytag
http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/20461267965#notes
======
wheels
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.

~~~
usaar333
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.

~~~
DanBC
> _When you don't know the language, knowing the alphabet is pretty useless._

Knowing the Japanese hiragana and katakana means you can work out some menus
in Japanese games - "startu"; "opshun"; etc. (This is not romaji, because
they're using English words and a Japanese alphabet. So what's that called?)

~~~
alinajaf
Careful with gairaigo. Most of the time it doesn't mean what you think it
means. Ever seen an ad for a mansion? In Japanese that refers to a type of
apartment. I challenge anyone who has no prior knowledge to guess what
'Delivery Health' means.

~~~
shard
Transliterated English is actually very useful for learning Korean, even if
the meaning is a little twisted sometimes. Fully 25% of my Korean knowledge is
transliterated English. It helps that Korea is probably the country with the
highest English-fever in Asia.

~~~
bane
It also helps with being able to read menus and direction signs and such as
the transliteration into English can be spotty.

------
ghiotion
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.

~~~
grepherder
The Cyrillic script[1] and the Armenian alphabet[2] were also devised in
similar fashion, and probably many more. It is not unusual for writing systems
or alphabets to find widespread usage in this manner.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script#History>

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet#History_and_d...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet#History_and_development)

~~~
duopixel
The Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics is another one. It was developed by a
missionary that noticed that when aboriginal where written in latin script the
result was often long and awkward.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics>

------
codyrobbins
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.h...](http://phonetics.ucla.edu/appendix/languages/korean/korean.html)

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>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant>

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone>

[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics)>

[5] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faucalized_voice>

[6] <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/171/3968/303> &
[http://home.fau.edu/lewkowic/web/Eimas%20infant%20speech%20d...](http://home.fau.edu/lewkowic/web/Eimas%20infant%20speech%20discrim%20Science%201971.pdf)

~~~
gurkendoktor
I am afraid this will be a trivial question now, but does that mean that
Korean pronunciation is much harder to learn than Japanese? I often heard that
they are very similar languages, and they can certainly sound similar to the
uninitiated.

~~~
codyrobbins
Japanese and Korean are actually not phylogenically related. In fact they’re
both generally considered to be language isolates, which means they don’t seem
to be related to any other languages. This may not be strictly true and there
are proposals that there could be a link through a hypothetical language
family called Altaic—they’re usually considered unrelated, though.

The “difficulty” of learning any particular language in relation to another is
a bit of a meaningless comparison in my opinion. Ultimately, it appears to be
the case that all human languages operate according to a common underlying
linguistic mechanism—the seeming differences between particular languages are
in fact probably actually just different surface realizations of the
underlying mechanism with particular options twiddled in various combinations
coupled with an idiosyncratic lexicon (i.e., a relatively unique but
ultimately arbitrary vocabulary). The nature of the underlying mechanism is
the subject of debate, as well as the list of the particular options
available, but it seems pretty clear that all languages are utilizing a common
underlying cognitive architecture.

That being said, it would seem to me if you define a relative acquisition
difficulty metric as something like

    
    
      D(x, y) = a*O(x, y) + b*P(x, y) + c*L(y) - d*C(x, y)
    
      O(x, y) = cardinality of the set of differences between the language “settings” of x and y
      P(x, y) = cardinality of the set of phonemic distinctions present in y but not x
      L(x)    = cardinality of the lexicon of x
      C(x, y) = cardinality of the set of cognates shared by the lexicons of x and y
    

where _a_ , _b_ , _c_ , and _d_ are scaling factors, then that might give you
some semi-reasonable rough correlation in the form of a “distance” between two
languages along various axes. The exact definition of _O_ ( _x_ , _y_ ) is far
from clear, however. And even just having knocked this out I’m realizing that
there’s almost an infinite number of other things you could throw in here that
you would arguably need to know to claim to have “learned” a language:
phonological processes, knowledge of and relative productivity of
morphological processes, pragmatics, etc. This is why I’m of the mind that any
such measure is of dubious utility, because you would need to take into
account a lot of factors—most of which we still don’t fully understand.

There’s probably work done on this somewhere but second language acquisition
isn’t my area of expertise.

~~~
dsrguru
First of all, Korean and Japanese _are_ very similar. They're in different
language families because they are not believed to have been evolutionarily
related (more closely than other languages in other families), but they are in
fact incredibly similar. This might be partly a result of tons of historical
contact between Korea and Japan and/or of both sending scholars to China in
ancient times, but the mechanism of their coevolution had to be more involved
than that. I don't know enough about it, and I'm not sure if linguists do
either. However, the fact remains that the two languages in their current
forms are closely related, which is what gurkendoktor was asking about in
regards to learning time. While the closed class words and inflectional
suffixes don't have related pronunciation, the general structure of the
languages are ridiculously similar. Word order is identical in many sentences,
both use particles or postpositions to mark the function of nouns, both use
topics instead of subjects, both allow you to omit the topic if it can be
inferred through context, both have a respect hierarchy built into the
grammar, both have tons of pronouns and related categories of family words,
both have the adversative passive of Chinese, both are agglutinative in the
sense that they allow you to add a noun after a verb phrase to form a relative
clause that modifies the noun, both have lots of similarly-pronounced Chinese-
derived open class words, both have the rare alveolo-palatal fricatives and
affricates in their sound inventories as is found in Mandarin, both make the
/h/ consonant a voiceless palatal fricative before [i] or [j], etc. Those are
just the similarities I can think of off the top of my head. I don't know much
Korean, but I'm sure there are a lot more similarities.

As for pronunciation difficulty, I can tell you that from the standpoint of a
native speaker of American English who can also articulate every consonant and
vowel in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese phonology is far easier for me than Korean
phonology. Japanese really only has one consonant whose place of articulation
doesn't exist in English or Mandarin (a voiceless bilabial fricative, which is
essentially an /f/ but with two lips instead of the bottom lip against the
upper teeth) and five monophthong vowels (their position in the mouth stays
the same for the duration of the sound), most of which are pretty standard
among languages whose vowels are monophthongs. While Japanese does have pitch
accent, so does Korean, and unlike Chinese, pitch almost never affects the
meaning of a word in the Japanese spoken in Tokyo (there are a couple
exceptions) or in the Korean spoken in Seoul. If you want to sound native,
you'll have to spend about the same amount of time in either language learning
the pitch contour of each word.

Korean on the other hand has more vowels than Japanese, one of which is now
pronounced as a diphthong that is very difficult for most English speakers to
pronounce correctly (although it's easy for anyone who knows French and easy
enough for anyone who can pronounce /y/). The real issue is that Korean has
those tense consonants whose specific manner of articulation doesn't exist in
any other language. It's the one part of Korean phonology I do not pronounce
correctly. Interestingly, I just came across this on Wikipedia:

'An alternative analysis[2] proposes that the "tensed" series of sounds are
(fundamentally) regular voiceless, unaspirated consonants; that the "laxed"
sounds are voiced consonants which become devoiced initially; and that the
primary distinguishing feature between word-initial "laxed" and "tensed"
consonants is that initial laxed sounds cause the following vowel to assume a
low-to-high pitch contour – a feature reportedly associated with voiced
consonants in many Asian languages – whereas tensed (and also aspirated)
consonants are associated with a uniformly high pitch.'

So maybe there is hope for us non-Koreans! But yeah, Korean pronunciation is
more difficult for most native speakers of English. Also, the grammar requires
a little more memorization than Japanese does since there are more
inflectional forms in Korean. On the other hand, the Korean writing system is
far simpler than that of Japanese since Koreans don't really use Chinese
characters anymore at all. It might also take you a few hours or days longer
to learn the Japanese syllabaries than the Korean alphabet. As this thread
shows, it's incredibly easy to learn to read and write Hangeul.

------
dbh937
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.

------
kitsune_
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.

~~~
wingerlang
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
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.

------
pm90
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
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!

------
spullara
I put together a cheat sheet a while ago:

<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.

------
bergie
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)

------
barumrho
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.>)

~~~
klodolph
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.

~~~
lifthrasiir
> 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.

~~~
klodolph
But you would still copy/paste to create subtly different glyphs, right? Just
like I can copy and paste parts of Han characters to make 村 校 林 枚 様 機 横 (look
at the left half), with slight modifications as necessary. (At a quick glance,
I suspect the font I use has four variations of the 木 radical among those
seven characters).

~~~
lifthrasiir
Right. Even worse, a grass radical (艸/艹) has more than several dozens of
possible glyphs.

------
steve8918
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
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.

~~~
mansr
Another exception is 시 being pronounced [shi].

~~~
guard-of-terra
That's no more exception than st in german being pronounced [scht].

"It doesn't produce minimal pairs".

~~~
mansr
Whenever pronunciation of a letter depends on the surrounding context, you
have an exception.

~~~
guard-of-terra
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.

------
throwaway54-762
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
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
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.

~~~
JBiserkov
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

~~~
pmjordan
This is definitely true, though not such a big deal for basic understanding in
practice, as the near-homophones usually have only subtly different meanings.
I also don't often find myself having to transcribe stuff, and if I do, I can
usually ask the speaker to check my spelling. On the other hand, reading
something and immediately being able to pronounce it with some accuracy is
very helpful, but attempting that with English words and especially names
("Cholmondeley" anyone?) often leads to unintentionally bizarre results.

(FWIW I speak English to a level that native speakers can't tell it's not my
first language unless I trip over words I only know from reading - People ask
me, "so where in England are you from" all the time. My French is just about
passable - I can get by for basic everyday conversations as long as the other
person doesn't speak too fast and they don't mind explaining/rephrasing the
occasional sentence. I'd agree that perfecting your French is a lot harder
than perfecting your English despite what I've said above.)

------
jarek
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>. 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.

------
RandallBrown
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.

~~~
kijin
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.

------
MichaelGG
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-
Syll...](http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kana-Reading-Japanese-
Syllabaries/dp/0824831640/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335218962&sr=8-1)

------
WildUtah
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.

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

~~~
helpbygrace
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
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.

------
mynameishere
You can learn to read Vietnamese much faster

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet>

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

------
runn1ng
I misread the title as "how to read Koran in 15 minutes".

....I would be quite interested in _that_.

------
bane
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>

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>

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.

------
bsinger
This kind of reminds me of the classic Tim Ferriss article:

[http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-
learn...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn-but-
not-master-any-language-in-1-hour-plus-a-favor/)

------
comfuture
안녕하세요

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

