Learn Korean Easy!

[msgreg]

I seem to remember seeing this a while ago. I thought it was interesting.

LearnKoreanEasy.jpg (495.39 KiB) Viewed 9719 times

Here is, I think, the original post and the original author.

Edited to add sources.

[Bonobo]

It will take more than five minutes for me my ole brains, fersure, but: Hey, this is cool! thx

[Kirby]

Looks like a decent way to learn hangeul. Once you have that down, you can basically read the sounds of what you see - like if you learned the english alphabet without knowing english, yet.

It's notable that many korean words are based on chinese characters (kanji/hanja).

In korea, they used to use chinese characters much more, but the trend is to use strictly the korean phonetic alphabet now.

For native korean speakers, that's cool, but for learning korean as a non native speaker, i recommend studying chinese characters - with the korean pronunciation and meanings. For a lot of chinese characters, meaning is similar between chinese, japanese, and korean, but there are sometimes funny differences.

Learning the underlying chinese characters helps at least in two ways:
1.) though it takes longer to learn korean this way, you can guess the meaning of new words that you see in hangeul.
2.) if you decide to learn japanese or chinese, you have a head start.

is being said, not all words in korean have a known chinese character origin. still, when a word has hanja, it's cool to know it... kinda like learning english word roots.

[Redbeard]

This gives me a chance to plug my all time favorite Korean historical drama Tree with Deep Roots. The plot is so twisted and complex that I can not describe it completely, but the main story concerns conspiracies and assassinations surrounding the creation of the Korean alphabet. Complex and subtle interwoven sub-plots, great marital art action and heartbreaking romance. Game of Thrones pales in comparison to this series. The only thing that would have made it better would have been a Baduk game or two.

[TheBigH]

Marital arts, huh? Are you sure this is suitable for a general audience?

[Mike Novack]

This might be a good time to add something to these discussions.

With regard to reading go books in some particular language the problem isn't really the same a learning the language (in full) but learning the language as it appears in a limited realm of discourse. That is usually a very small subset of the full language. That's the reason computer programs can often succeed passing the "Turing Test" (can you tell if a person or a computer) provided the discussion is limited to a small subset of the language.

Has anybody investigated just how large or small a subset of Korean or Japanese or Chinese appears in a typical go book written in one of these languages?

[tajimamori]

Wow. That's a really good and short lesson of hangeul. I bet those of you who learned hangeul just now are having that awkward moment when you can read everything and have no idea what it means

For native korean speakers, that's cool, but for learning korean as a non native speaker, i recommend studying chinese characters - with the korean pronunciation and meanings. For a lot of chinese characters, meaning is similar between chinese, japanese, and korean, but there are sometimes funny differences.

Hmm. I disagree that non-native speakers should learn hanja. It's not used much, so it's not practical to study it. Chinese characters (hanzi/hanja/kanji) are logograms and hangeul uses phonemes. Logograms take longer to pick up. Hangeul is much easier to learn and hanja would just confuse a Korean beginner, unless of course, you already know Chinese and Japanese kanji. I guess if you study all three languages and are fairly comfortable, looking at similarities through hanzi, hanja, and kanji would be an interesting supplement to your learning.

[Twitchy Go]

Wow. That's a really good and short lesson of hangeul. I bet those of you who learned hangeul just now are having that awkward moment when you can read everything and have no idea what it means

That's the story of my life in KORE 101-102.
I'm working on fixing that though.

Speaking as someone who is currently learning the language, this is a very good intro to pronouncing hangeul words.

[Kanin]

This might be a good time to add something to these discussions.

With regard to reading go books in some particular language the problem isn't really the same a learning the language (in full) but learning the language as it appears in a limited realm of discourse. That is usually a very small subset of the full language. That's the reason computer programs can often succeed passing the "Turing Test" (can you tell if a person or a computer) provided the discussion is limited to a small subset of the language.

Has anybody investigated just how large or small a subset of Korean or Japanese or Chinese appears in a typical go book written in one of these languages?

A Swedish Go player made a script that looks at Kanji frequency for Japanese Go websites, and perhaps more interesting - one that looks at word frequency for a number of sites.

Kanji frequency: http://hem.passagen.se/gusfah/kanji_freq_go.html
Word frequency: http://gvfl.se/JapaneseAndGo/word_frequency.html

Enjoy.

[Kirby]

Hmm. I disagree that non-native speakers should learn hanja. It's not used much, so it's not practical to study it. Chinese characters (hanzi/hanja/kanji) are logograms and hangeul uses phonemes. Logograms take longer to pick up. Hangeul is much easier to learn and hanja would just confuse a Korean beginner, unless of course, you already know Chinese and Japanese kanji. I guess if you study all three languages and are fairly comfortable, looking at similarities through hanzi, hanja, and kanji would be an interesting supplement to your learning.

Just because it isn't used much doesn't mean it's not useful.

Think long term. Yeah, if you just want to pronounce words, then learning hangeul directly is the way to go. But if you get to the point where you understand the roots of many of the words comprising the language, then you can really have a handle on new words, and a better understanding of what vocabulary really means, even if there isn't a direct english translation for it.

So I think if you want to learn a few quick phrases, just learn to read hangeul, or maybe learn enough to travel around in Korea, learning hanja is not valuable.

But if you want to learn for the long-run, I think learning hanja is a good way to go. You don't have to learn all of the strokes or anything, but if you can get into your head that word X and word Y both share the same word root/hanja Z, then I think you have a much deeper understanding of the language than just learning X and Y independently.

As a side note, I think this is also why it's tougher to read Japanese written purely in hiragana once you've started learning kanji.

[Kirby]

This might be a good time to add something to these discussions.

With regard to reading go books in some particular language the problem isn't really the same a learning the language (in full) but learning the language as it appears in a limited realm of discourse. That is usually a very small subset of the full language. That's the reason computer programs can often succeed passing the "Turing Test" (can you tell if a person or a computer) provided the discussion is limited to a small subset of the language.

Has anybody investigated just how large or small a subset of Korean or Japanese or Chinese appears in a typical go book written in one of these languages?

Depends on the book, but in my experience, while the subset is not necessarily large, periodically you run into "one-shot words" that aren't really "go words", but just happen to be there.

This is natural, because even if you're writing a go book, you can use various vocabularly to do so, even if most of the time you use such a subset.

[msgreg]

A message from the artist:

By the way, I have a new print edition of learn to Read Korean! I made it just to sell at various bookstores and comic shows in Korea, but it can be snagged along with a bunch of comics (Korean and English) right here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rya ... inter-2013

Ryan Estrada
http://www.ryanestrada.com
http://www.the-whole-story.com

It looks to me like $60 or more gets the "The Learn to Read Korean Comics Collection" including a travel-size print edition of the Learn To Read Korean in 15 Minutes.