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Comment by solidsnack9000 | Hacker News Reader

For the first year or so, pretty much everyone who's learning is going to need the romanization alongside / above the Hangul. It's probably always going to be true that more than 2/3 of your potential customers -- 2/3 of the people who come to the website looking to see if this is for them -- will be in this category.

There is a kind of anti-pattern in tools of this kind where the people building them already know some of the basics and so leave them out. It shows up in tools for Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew... I've studied quite a few languages and so have been the beginner over and over.

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I absolutely disagree. Romanized Korean is harder to read than Korean itself. The sounds implied by the roman spelling do not match the sounds you're supposed to make, and you lose the syllable boundaries that aid in pronunciation. I feel like a caveman stumbling over my letters when I try to read a romanized word.

A one-page alphabet reference chart would be enough to remind the reader which letter is which without relying on the romanization crutch.

Normally I don't like to make argumentative internet comments but I really passionately think romanization is a detriment to a learning tool.

We don't need to be this divisiveabout this. There is no right way as to how people learn

As someone that knows and can read Hindi, Gujarat, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and beginner at Hangul and Hiragana, romanization absolutely helps anchor the sound. The actual sound when speaking is going to change anyways as your converse with more people. But at least, romanization helps recall and focus on the actual word that you are learning.

I agree with this after a short while I turned off the romanization in many learning apps as it just messes with/undermines your actual learning.

As someone that is self taught and fairly good at Korean-- I agree. Using romanization of any kind is a nightmare in Korean. The only way to really grasp the language is to be able to read Hangul as soon as possible.

Using romanization is a lot worse than in a language like Japanese. In Japanese the romanization somewhat maps well to Japanese. In Korean, the various romanization methods are horrendous and don't come close to Korean at all.

Not only that-- many grammar forms require understanding the Hangul vowels to understand how to conjugate them. If you're using romanization they don't exist.

Even worse, Korean sound change rules make it hard to read Hangul without a lot of practice. If you're using romanization you're completely doomed.

> For the first year or so, pretty much everyone who's learning is going to need the romanization alongside / above the Hangul.

For folks who are learning Korean, hangul is maybe two days to get the basics and maybe a week or less to be able to get comfortable with it.

For super-casuals who just want a ballpark representation, you might be right, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to design around these super-casual folks — when they decide to get serious about learning Korean, Hangul will come quickly.

Hangul, as a phonetic representation, has about the same difficulty as learning hiragana, which takes about the same amount of time to learn.

Maybe if you are referring to older Korean texts that had Chinese characters in them, then I could understand.

> … It shows up in tools for Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew

Kanji (not a syllabary or alphabet), hanzi (not a syllabary or alphabet), and no vowels respectively.

These languages need some romanization support much more than Hangul, imho.

Potential customers for an app like this don't neatly segment into "...folks who are learning Korean..." and "...super-casuals who just want a ballpark representation...". There is a continuum, and the continuum is weighted towards the casual side. Honestly, if most people only learn a little Korean from this app and it broadens their world only a little bit, it's still done tremendous good. Most people are not going to learn Korean, Japanese, Chinese, &c, &c.

I don't think you'll be able to find empirical support for the idea that romanization is unhelpful after the first week of someone's taking up Hangul in a serious way; or for the idea that Hangul is as simple as Hiragana.

Many people say things like this -- "two days to get the basics" and "a week or less to be...comfortable" -- but I doubt there is any empirical support for figures like that. I suspect that a review of the literature will show that people are still referring back to the romanization for the first two years of their studies, across a wide array of language families, if their first language uses the Roman alphabet.

Hebrew has vowel marks. They are little used but they are very helpful, as well.

Hebrew characters are a lot harder to learn that Hangul.

Well, look -- I think there is a lot to say there; but I wonder how to put it on an empirical footing.

Hangul is definitely one of the most logically organized, consistent and systematic systems of writing in the world -- and it may actually be number one in all those categories.

I personally think leaving romanization after the first week of learning Hangul is best, unless you are focusing only on getting better at speaking.

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