Learn Korean in 15 minutes

[jose]

[domainguru]

Excellent stuff. Its true as well. Korean is a very easy language to learn to read. My daughter can read Korean well, though only knows what 10% of the words actually mean!

[blastfromthepast]

Korean is difficult not because of the simple writing system, but because they got rid of Chinese characters due to nationalism. Unfortunately, this nationalism came too late, and a huge portion of Korean vocabulary is actually Classical Chinese words. According to the wikipedia page on Korean Language, 65% of all Korean words are actually borrowed from Chinese. Since Korean doesn't have tones like Chinese, all these words which were taken from Chinese sound alike. It is not uncommon for a single Hangul cluster to map to a dozen or more Chinese characters or what are essentially words in Korean. The other way around is confusing too: many Chinese characters also have several ways to read them in Korean, which adds to the confusion.

[andre]

Excellent graphic

Coincidentally, a couple of days ago, I wrote a brief blog article on a relationship between Unicode Hangul Syllables and the OSX GongjinCheong Romaja Input Method http://schappo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/0...nd-hangul.html

André 小山 Schappo