learning hangul (sort of)

i have a friend who's made it his life goal to convince me to learn esperanto, and i probably won't do it. i'm not a linguaphile, really (or a lingvafilo, according to google translate). but at the beginning of nothing-happening-anymore, I decided I needed something that felt productive, or a skill to show off later as proof that i didn't sit around wasting a global pandemic. thanks, capitalism. so i'm learning to read korean, which despite not having any real use in my life (i don't have a korean background or enjoy kpop, nor do i see myself being stranded in korea anytime soon), still somehow felt like something i should do when the idea first crossed my mind. although notice I said read and not speak, because i can't speak korean. i don't know what the words i'm saying mean, but i can pronounce the text on my packs of rice noodles with about 85% accuracy. so that feels like something?

okay but really, it's pretty easy if you have half an hour to spare. the hangul alphabet was actually designed to be as phonetically simple as possible, as a "language of the people" in contrast to hanja which includes more complicated chinese characters, and was reserved for elites for many years. although there are lots of vowels and consonants to learn, all of these characters are consistent in the way they're pronounced unlike the mess that is the english language.

the case for hangul as the world's easiest writing system

i had never really tried learning a language that didn't use latin characters, which made my research a bit more daunting until i came across a video called something like "learn to read korean in five minutes". this sounded ridiculous to me so i clicked it of course, and it didn't lie! the video (linked below) presents a bunch of easy tricks to remember the pronunciation of a character based on what it looks like, and while it's not perfect or complete, it gets you about 70% of the way there. from there, i looked at a few youtube reading lessons to get a feel for how accurately i was pronouncing things and find where the holes in my knowledge were. the two major things that the original video didn't cover are the arrangements characters can be in to form words and sentences, and compound vowels. you can learn more about both in the article linked above, but this video is a good start.

learn to read korean in five minutes (seriously)

as an example of the highly intellectual "picture look like thing" method, here's a word in korean: 나무

to figure out how to prononce this, here's the process i go through according to the video above:

ㄴ looks like a nose, we'll take the "n" sound from nose

ㅏ looks like a line with another line sticking out after it, so we'll take the "a" sound from after

ㅁ looks like a mouth, it's pronounced like an "m"

ㅜ looks like a line with another line under it, so we'll take the "u" sound in under.

this word is pronounced "namu" (a as in after, u as in under). it means tree!

i may very well have gotten something wrong in this post, feel free to let me know if that's the case. more likely, i've probably skipped a huge rule of learning korean that i haven't encountered yet. but that's going to be the MO of this blog i think, getting things wrong but definitely learning. i'll get on the rest of my korean learning another day when i have a better reason to, but this feels like something cool for now. 평화! (이것을 위해 구글 번역을 사용 했습니까?)

-atyrfingerprints

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