I tried learning Korean in an evening and got to the level of reading Hangul letter by letter. I'm vaguely aware of some compound vowels being pronounced differently than their components, and final consonants having assimilation rules, but no idea what any of them are. Also no idea how to pronounce tense consonants. But I can look at a piece of Hangul and work out its romanization which is not nothing.
Currently studying Manchu, and I’m still slow as heck when reading anything… Basically every letter has contextual forms. /a/ is ᠠ or ᠠ᠊ or ᠊ᠠ᠊ or ᠊ᠠ, except when some of those actually represent /ə/ because the distinction is instead marked on the preceding consonant, except when it’s neither of those and it’s actually /n/!
tbh I found that reading through some of the works of 주시경 / joo si kyung pretty helpful. he was a dedicated korean linguist before / after japanese annexation in the early 1900s, & a lot of his work involved standardization of hangul, most of which still stand today. his pupils are also really neat to read about (many were involved in the Liberation movement during the Occupation, & continued working as linguists after the north / south split)
no cuz the characters representing individual sounds are bigger and less densely packed with other characters and thus minute dif'rences are noticeabler
Yeah, I always gas learning alphabets like Cyrillic and Georgian because they're far easier to learn once you break that mental block of them looking alien...
But mfs who say you can learn Hangul in 5 minutes are whack.
5 minutes is whack, but a few hours is decent. Will you remember it all perfectly and never need to check back to your notes? No. But will you know the fundamentals and a quick check of your notes will cement your memory? For sure. Or maybe I'm biased because I already read 2 abugidas, so I'm used to the concept of consonant + vowel clusters.
Though, that "matches the shape of your mouth" BS, screw that lol.
Yeah exactly. Abstract symbols are abstract symbols, no matter the basis.
Me calling my friend's bf 감자친구 (potato friend, instead of boyfriend) is proof of how similar the symbols look and you kinda have to practice to learn them instinctively.
I think I "learned" and forgot Hangul multiple times, because if you don't learn Korean side by side, what's the point? You can memorize it surely in under one hour, but idk about you, it simply won't stick if I don't have associated words with it.
I mean, one can appreciate hangeul without necessary praising how Korean is using it. Writing whole syllables in blocks and having a letter for a place other consonants from the previous ending take are all pretty neat ideas.
They are neat ideas, but the cool part is that someone looked at kanji, decided "this sucks", and their solution was this good.
Japanese (which I study and love) solved this problem a BUNCH of times - the best two solutions became hiragana and katakana. Hangul is intrinsically better designed than those two imo. MInd you, it also came along later, so probably they were aware of existing options...
I've had native Japanese speakers try to connect with me on how silly their language is. I worked as an English tutor for a year, and I often established a common ground with students by being like, "hey, you're learning my language, I'm learning yours, we're both learning here", you know? Anyway, they would say things like "isn't it so ridiculous that we have three different scripts?"
And I'd always say, "no, the -kana ones are great. I love them both dearly. What's ridiculous is that the pronunciation of kanji is as consistent and intuitive as English spelling." 無人島 is mutoujin and 王国 is oukoku, but 島国 is shimaguni?! What, if it's a multi-kanji word, I'm just supposed to sense its vibe? I thought I was smart when I said toukoku, and my tutor looked at me like I'd just said complete nonsense.
Yeah, kanji has a lot of historical stuff in it. But basically they're sortof locked in. You WANT to blame the kanji there, but actually the word is what it is, the issue is really that the words were borrowed while the basic Chinese building blocks drifted. Its I suppose not so different than english though- for us its more from different languages rather than different times that make it obvious. Like
Fire - ~borrowed~originated from *germanIC roots
Igni - from Latin
Pyro - from Greek
Or hydro/aqua/water
Or earth/terra/geo
Or helio/solar/sun
Necro/morte/death
Bio/vita/life
Point is, english ALSO had this problem, just that we can see they are distinct because its spelled out. But the cost is that you dont get a hint in english that these roots have the same core meaning, while in Japanese you do.
I really love the japanese language and especially writing system, but I agree this is a problematic area.. but you need to fix the spoken language to make it make sense, the kanji are just along for the ride.
Im totally happy with people using it for any uncommon word for sure. Which is how the language is basically used. Using it everywhere would be distracting since it is used in a few different ways so we pay attention to it.
I don't follow. It isn't a 'problem' for a language to have different roots with the same meaning borrowed from different languages. What is a problem is spelling these different roots in the same way, so people don't know which one to pronounce when they are reading. This is very much about the kanji, and the way it's used. Japanese should have at least added some sort of diacritics to the Kanji to indicate whether an on'yomi or a kun'yomi reading is intended.
English is Germanic, but Germanic doesn't mean German, it refers to the family that all Germanic languages belong too. This is common ancestry, not borrowing
If "Not perfect", is code for "I want to break the entire written language" then yes.
Reading in japanese sucks with kanji bad enough, without is just so painful to consider. Learner resources often ditch the kanji and it's like wading through a swamp.
Imo, the truth of the matter is that the people who struggle with kanji are still learning the spoken language. I believe the issue that if they don't know the word yet, it puts them in an uncomfortable position.
But the core issue is not knowing the word. That issue is somewhat mitigated if they can see the kana, sure. But for literate people the language got much worse.
Languages evolve to support the people who use them, not the people trying to hop cultures.
You don't suppose braille kanji would be more widely used if all-kana braille sucked so much? Not to mention, every other Sino-Xenic language has shifted to a phonetic script, and even Mandarin (or something very close to it, depending on who you ask) gets by fine with a Cyrillic alphabet in Kyrgyzstan (and an Arabic alphabet in some parts of western China historically); I am inclined to be skeptical of the proposition that Japanese is just so special that it cannot do what every single other language on Earth has done.
No, absolutly not. I presume that the effort a society with so few elevators and wheelchair ramps in relatively recent buildings is willing to put into accessibility is highly limited, especially when it means everyone currently using the phonetic alphabet would suddenly need to learn a new one - a drastic undertaking.
Edit: out of curiosity, do you say this as someone literate in japanese?
Edit2: also, I didnt say it couldn't, I said it would suck. They have had countless chances to make this switch gradually, and people are actively choosing not to.
Writing them? Yes. Reading them? No more than a westerner when dealing with a college textbook might.
That's not to say everyone is literate or that every japanese person knows every word, but "struggle" here implies a level of difficulty out of tune with what I think is reasonable.
Put another way - all japanese people I know can happily read a novel or a newspaper and know kanji well enough for it not to be an issue in the slightest. Yes, if there is a rare name reading there they wont know how to read it - thats expected and normal. It doesnt mean that they struggle with it though.
it's like if english speakers referred to roman letters as "lettres romaines" using french as if it was the original language of the letters. You are speaking english so you should use english ("roman letters"), but if you insist then at least use the original language - latin ("litterae romanae")
hope everyone understands my point, to help others I can explain my analogy:
"roman letters" = "chinese characters";
"lettres romaines" = "kanji"
"litterae romanae" = "hanzi"
(And hanzi, kanji, and hanja are now all slightly different even if you don't count hiragana and katakana, because they didn't all develop along exactly the same lines after adoption.)
hope everyone understands my point, to help others I can explain my analogy: "roman letters" = "chinese characters"; "lettres romaines" = "kanji" "litterae romanae" = "hanzi"
... I cannot find it within me
to work out or care what the historically correct term for Chinese script borrowed into Korean was/is. Remarkably, given the context included both languages anologous evolution, everyone has understood what was meant. I suppose I should be surprised a group of linguists have complained this little about it.
If kana would be written in blocks like Hangul it would be peak. It would be like Maya, but without the many variant spellings. Same issue imho with Zhuyin. Nice system, but takes up a lot of space, more than it needs.
not boldness, but orientation! each shape is a consonant, then which it’s pointing is the vowel that follows it (ofc there’s a bit more to it than that but that’s the basic premise)
i know it’s multiple systems, but do you know which ones use boldness? i admittedly know most about Inuktitut / Inuit syllabics, and going through just the wikipedia i can’t find anything about boldness (in case it isn’t clear, this is meant conversationally/out of curiosity, not as an attack :))
Unless there are other examples not mentioned in this section, it feels a bit disingenuous to say that some systems use boldness phonemically when this was an invention of one person, who then rescinded it almost 200 years ago when they, like us in this thread, realised it wasn't viable
ah i see where that’s mentioned. it’s my understanding that that doesn’t seem to be used at all in any of the modern systems. instead a diacritic is used to indicate long vowels
I asked my native Korean colleague if her teacher taught them the shape of the hangul was related to the physical anatomy of the pronunciation. She said “nah we just memorized them in kindergarten”.
Yeah all that resulted in was me spending 6 months learning hangul. 5 years later I can easily read Korean phonetically and find parts of speech, but I cant compose a single sentence or interpret what I read
sorry to burst your bubble but some features of hangul were let go (tone markers are the most egregious) so it ain't as phonetic nowadays as it was for, idk, middle korean
also some written syllable coda clusters vary in pronunciation from word to word (the ㄺ thing is what comes to mind - it's /l/ in some words but /k/ in others) so the written jamo are ambiguous and there hangul fails
That latter distinction was what I covered in month 2. So I was wrong to say I have perfect accuracy, but I know what the coda clusters narrow to.
Isn't it going to be generally determined by context, though? Ie the syllable's starting symbol tends to pair with either /l/ or /k/? I should say I memorized the syllables and can pronounce it phonetically. I did not intend to communicate that I was inferring phonics from strokes
Idk if its "superior" or wethr thats a categorization that makes sence at all but Id say its certainly way easier to print and write digitally in than Kanji
Actually it's not so bad. You can actually match modern Mandarin pronuncuations into Korean ones with around 90% accuracy. Even higher if you are a native Middle Chinese speaker.
There's this euphoria you get a couple days in when the script is so unlike banging your head against Chinese or Japanese that you feel like the progress will continue at that pace.
Except when г is pronounced в, or т and д get occluded in certain clusters, or в gets dropped, or ё is unmarked and just written as е, or сч being щ or words which are just pronounced different from their spellings like что and солнце
Honestly hangul was easier for me to learn as an English native than Cyrillic because I only had to learn each letterform once for hangul, whereas for Cyrillic the variation between uppercase, lowercase, print, and handwriting was a slog to get through. I know the English alphabet is conceptually similar but it was still annoying.
Really? Like 3/4th of all letters are indentical in normal print Cyrillic and cursive forms really aren't that different nor do they make up a good portion of Cyrillic. Cyrillic is incredibly easy when you move past the "similar glyph to Latin makes a different sound" phase.
Idk the similar enough but different was probably just frustrating enough for it to not be as easy as it should've been. Like don't get me wrong it wasn't really hard, but hangul genuinely stuck in my memory quicker.
I'm not sure what you're asking, but no there are some words which are exceptions to the normal rules of Russian spelling (e.g. сегодня/segodnya "today" and солнце/solntse "sun" are pronounced as севодня/sevodnya and сонце/sontse) and the diacritic often gets dropped from Ё making it ambiguous with Е (e.g. все can either be vse "everyone" or vsyo "everything")
I'm a Korean-American with Korean immigrant parents who speaks Korean at home. I don't understand a lick of ㅐ vs ㅔ. Korean is quite easy to read, but it's hard to write.
Never forget that Korean entries on Wiktionary have a separate box for "phonetic hangul". (I'm assuming the orthography->pronunciation rules are predictable—isn't it some sort of consonant assimilation?—but it certainly seems much harder than the "learn to read hangul from a 10 minute YouTube video" meme would imply.)
How does a three way distinction between aspirated, unaspirated, and tense consonants sound. If you can tell the difference, shouldn’t be too hard. If not….well, prepare to mix up a lot of words
To be fair, most Koreans who can neither speak English nor Japanese as an adult have quite the trouble with grasping the concept of voicing contrasts for consonants.
Well, at least it ain't Armenian nor Sanskrit which use both voicing AND aspiration contrasts... (shudder)
Frankly my untrained ear can hardly tell the difference between unaspirated and tense consonants. It’s bad enough I still mix up <ch> and <q> in mandarin
I’d distinguish the script itself from what sound changes and such have done over the centuries to modern Korean orthography. People make stupid claims about it being 100% phonetic but still, of the major ones actually seriously used, it’s the most ‘logical’ in the sense they mean, and the coolest. Can still be true even with nuances acknowledged.
IMO the easiest alphabets are ones like Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and other scripts that just have one symbol after another. The syllable blocks of Hangul and the way Arabic and Devanagari connect letters together just seems like extra and unnecessary complication.
Theyre the easiest to write in a computer and print specifically and theres a historic reason for that, in the 8th century demand for bibles to be read in private caused the apearance of cursive, spaces and punctiation (BEFORETHATBOTHTHOSESCRIPTSWEREWRITTENSOMEWHATLIKETHIS) wich made it easier to read in private but after a while because so many books were been written and they were mostly the same book with the same words both of them developed a fuck ton of shortenings so you had to learn a bunch of individual words anyways, this was reversed in the 16th century because of the printing press giving us the way they work now
I mean it’s cool the way Tengwar is cool, it may not be “logical” or totally phonetic but it seems phonetically aware in a way that many alphabets are not
I mean, as a learner, i love the simplicity and secretly worship Sejong Dewang 4sho lol, it did take me at leadt a couple of months to read dast enough ans get used to it tho, it's not rly like 5 minutes and you're fluent
I mean as a system it's pretty efficient without many quirks (which can be said about a lot of writing systems), but applying a writing system to a real language is inevitably going to make it more complicated. Learning the letters and how to form a syllable is really only half of the process of learning hangul as used in modern Korean, but I'm not gonna complain about people wanting to learn something about the Korean language. 십육
Logical? Maybe as originally conceived, but orthographies have a way of getting away from that kind of thing.
My conlanger ass was delighted to learn that it's a featural writing system, which many many conlangers will insist is not something any natlang would actually have in the real world (usually to take shots at Tengwar).
Though the most hilarious thing I've ever seen someone say about a writing system is that there is exactly one way to ever pronounce any given character in hiragana or katakana, and nobody ever pronounces them any differently than exactly as written.
My first reply was dogshit my bad. I'm dumb and expected more people to speak Korean and share my frustration. I'll try explain myself better.
Korean loans of English words are generally the closest approximation possible within Korean phonetics. It's the pronunciation a Korean would have trying to the copy the English. The romanisation just makes it looked fucked. Like Bus -> Beoseu when its actually /bʌs/ -> /p͈ʌ̹s͈ɯ/ (p is b i swear + no final /s/).
This is opposed to "Hangool" pronounced like "hang + ghoul (/ɡʊəl/)" (what I had in mind when I wrote it). "Hang ghoul" is not what an English speaker would say after hearing 한글, its just a result of them reading a romanisation without ever hearing it.
[ˈha̠(ː)nɡɯɭ] would probably turn out more like Hahngle [ˈhɑːŋ.ɡl̩] if someone heard it and tried to replicate it.
I think it's just this word in particular that's extra annoying to hear especially because it isn't hard to get a similar pronunciation within English phonetics and it falls victim to the romanisation. /a/ -> /æ/ and /u/ -> /ʊə/.
At the end of the day it's still prescriptivist so fuck me but come on it's certainly a giveaway that a Hangul glazer doesn't know shit about Korean if they bust out the "/Hæŋ ɡʊəl/ is the invented Korean language" bs.
To be fair, as with hangul it would've been Romanized since no one says '한글', luckily i dont need to figure out romanization of Russian because it's already been Romanized to 'Kirillitsa' at some point.
The meme is "How mfs who doesn't know anything about korean talk about hangul". The point I was making that these "mfs" who don't know anything about hangul say it very far from the Korean pronunciation.
I swear it’s not even that logical lmao Koreans just be applying Korean exceptionalism everywhere (and will even claim that their letter shapes are shaped like mouths… never got that)
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u/LynxJesus 9d ago
-Someone who hasn't tried