How to read Korean in 15 minutes
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I'm on vacation in Israel this week and learned the Hebrew alphabet with standard flash cards in 2 hours (incidentally by doing something similar to this post by remembering the names based on something the character looks like). At various points I've learned the Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets in a similar amount of time.
The real difficulty is, naturally, actually learning the language. The additional burden of it using a separate regular alphabet is negligible in comparison.
On the other hand you do have languages like Chinese where learning the written language actually is the majority of the work. Spoken Chinese is probably one of the easier languages out there for a person coming from a random language.
Road signs in general wildy vary. The name 'Weizmann' (as in [1]) is generally butchered in latin script. The best form I found so far was in Acre and spelled 'Wiseman'.
Often the signs just contain a transcript of the Hebrew word. I saw a couple of signs that spell out 'Nemal', which isn't particularly helpful unless you know that this is the Hebrew word for the port.
Bottom line: The road signs here confuse the hell out of me. I'm amazed that they helped you learn the alphabet somehow.
Knowing the Japanese hiragana and katakana means you can work out some menus in Japanese games - "startu"; "opshun"; etc. (This is not romaji, because they're using English words and a Japanese alphabet. So what's that called?)
デリヘルの意味が分からないはずなのに・・・ ಠ_ಠ
As a student that is currently learning Chinese, the first sentence is true, from a Chinese perspective. The written language is extremely important for Chinese nationals; I've heard of all sorts of arguments from expats at my school, saying stuff like: "I just want to learn how to say X; when am I going to write it!?" Practically speaking, reading is much easier than writing (I can read way more than I can write) and once you hit a particular threshold of characters, you can read 90% of the text around you.
As for the second sentence, for a person with no background in tonal languages, learning the tones in Mandarin is extremely challenging. I assuming that the parent is a native English speaker. According to the Foreign Service Institute, Mandarin and Cantonese (you didn't specify what kind of Chinese) are among the hardest languages to learn for a native English speaker.[0]
I think Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) is difficult. And this is coming from a native English speaker with a background in Cantonese (my parents are from Hong Kong).
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_difficult_language_to_lea...
I'm not even a native English speaker, I'm Greek, which also isn't tonal.
The biggest mistake of most Chinese learners is taking tones too seriously. Really, they aren't that important. If you screw up a tone in context you'll still be understood. Focus on words and grammar first, pronunciation isn't that important since most people have dialects. Cantonese people speaking mandarin can be quite entertaining though.
When I first moved to Beijing, I had problems getting the taxi drivers to understand me since I wasn't putting the 'er' behind everything, which is local dialect. Suffice it to say, I now speak with a Beijing accent.
One of my friends, who is native Chinese insisted the tones are critical. I asked her how they understand lyrics in music since the tones get dropped in favor of the melody.
Turns out the tones aren't that critical.
I'd like to add that this depends on where you are. The Taiwanese almost completely merge s/sh, z/zh, c/ch and also n/ng in some cases. You cannot distinguish between 4 and 10 without tones here. I have often heard that the Taiwanese rely more on tones, and Beijingers rely more on the actual sounds (as in Western languages).
Also, most of the time when people do not understand me, it is precisely because of the tones. I still often encounter situations where a friend will repeat my last sentence character for character, making me think "that's what I said!!", but apparently I didn't.
Reading is super easy, handwriting is a useless but fun hobby. Pronunciation is super tough.
(I am German, though - but if anything, I feel that we have it easier to pronounce Mandarin sounds.)
When I'm really tired, I sometimes change my 'sh' to 's' and sound more southern. Nobody really cares. However, I do screw up sometimes when saying words like "jichang" and "jingcheng," and will wind up on the wrong expressway in the taxi. This has not much to do with tones though.
But their criteria is the study time required to reach proficiency in both spoken and written language. Arguably, Chinese and Japanese wouldn't take so long to learn if they had simpler writing systems.
I gave up on written Chinese a while ago. I can text well enough and do some simple IM conversations, basically my writing mirrors my oral skills fairly closely. But I can't read a sign, a notice, a newspaper, its almost another language and I'm not so interested in putting the effort in.
Most languages also have a large number of words that an English speaker will recognise — and even more if they've ever learned any other language. Being able to transliterate at least lets you have a good chance of spotting some things you'll know. This is even more so in places where there'll be a large number of imported words, such as many restaurants, cafés, etc.
It really helps in a coffee shop to be able to get as far as choosing between 'Espreso', 'Kapuchino', 'Nas so sladoled', 'Makiyato malo', 'Makiyato golemo', 'Fredo', 'Frape', 'Ladno chokoladno mleko', 'Klasic crno chokolado', 'Klasic belo chokolado', or 'Meksikansko chokolado', rather than a board full of gibberish.
People think that it must be rock-solid because it's full of weird symbols. By the same token, the foreign person attempting to learn English might have a lot more trouble, for all its complexities and idiosyncrasies.
While trying to learn Thai and Arabic at varying points years ago, I was frustrated to find that so many of the books out there ignore the native alphabet/script and instead rely on various romanization or transliteration schemes. In many cases I found these schemes, particularly the IPA [1], just as hard or harder to learn than the native script and pronunciation.
I understand that IPA has it's place, particularly in academic circles and/or if there is no native speaker around to model for proper pronunciation, but if you're giving me an audio CD too, what's the point of the intermediary?
However, it can be extremely valuable, because it distinguishes between every consonant and vowel sound that exists in the language. Many times, there are far more sounds than letters -- for example, English has five vowels but at least three times as many distinct vowel sounds. Plus, many times these distinctions don't even exist in your native language, and it is very hard to even realize they are there in recordings, because you're not used to listening for them.
Learning the IPA pronunciations forces you to become aware of every sound in the language, and distinguish between different sounds in different words that you might otherwise go for years without detecting. It's a high-investment, high-reward learning technique, and ideally used together with audio recordings.
Indeed. I went to Bulgaria, and one of my friends learned Cyrillic on the bus ride from the airport to the hotel. Of course, Cyrillic is probably the easiest alphabet to learn for somebody who reads English and knows a bit of the Greek alphabet.
I .. am only learning passively by now. Lessons proved quite useless and at work I speak English anyway. Enjoy your stay!
I've always believed that spoken languages that are constructed/contrived are doomed to failure (esperanto, klingon, etc). I'm not saying that Korean itself is contrived, but it's fascinating that the alphabet was created like that.
This system gave Korean its own writing system, and a good, simple-to-learn one at that.
For example, you can read scholar Choi Manri's (a contemporary of Sejong) explanation of why he opposes hangul here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Man_Ri
By the way, there was an excellent South Korean historical TV drama that aired late last year called Tree With Deep Roots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_With_Deep_Roots) that covered the creation of hangul by Sejong and the opposition of the entrenched nobility to its promulgation (links to 720p video and English subtitles are available if anyone's interested).
In fact, hangul was banned by a subsequent king after peasants (who were previously illiterate because of the years it took to become educated in Chinese characters) made signs in hangul and started protesting outside his palace. It wasn't until the modernizing Gabo Reforms of 1894-96 that vernacular Korean replaced Classical Chinese as the official written language of the state.
And even then, words of Sinitic origin (which makes up 60% of contemporary Korean vocabulary) continued to be written in Chinese characters, with hangul used only for native Korean words, similar to how Japanese is written to this day (although Japanese uses Chinese characters for many words of Japanese origin as well). It wasn't until the early 1990s that big Korean newspapers, such as the Chosun Ilbo, started dropping hanja from the majority of their writing (though it is still used in a few situations).
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script#History
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet#History_and_d...
For example, it has three distinct unvoiced velar stops [1] which are all considered the same sound in English: normal [k], aspirated [kʰ], and faucalized [k͈].
We use both the normal and aspirated [2] unvoiced velar stops in English as positional allophones [3], meaning we consider them the same sound but they’re actually different and we distinguish between them unconsciously depending on where the sound occurs in a word. For example, /k/ is aspirated in word-initial position in words like cam but unaspirated after word-initial /s/ in words like scam. If you listen closely enough you realize that you turbulently expire a lot of air after the c in cam but don’t do so in scam. Despite using both phones [4] in English, you consider them more or less the same hard k sound—if you pronounce cam with an unaspirated /k/ it may sound slightly odd but you’ll still consider it the same word cam. The problem is that in Korean doing so would result in two different words—so it makes it hard for English speakers to perceive distinct words in Korean that differ this way, and to pronounce the correct word that they intend when talking.
This is true for many languages because phoneme inventories never overlap, but it’s especially difficult for English learners of Korean because Korean has a third /k/ sound—the faucalized [5] one—and it doesn’t occur at all in English. I know phonologists—people who are trained in the study of human speech categories—who have an extremely difficult time discerning between [k] and [k͈].
Peter Ladefoged, one of the world’s foremost phoneticians, has a fantastic website to accompany his phonetics textbook and it has recordings of all the sounds known to be produced in human languages. You can listen to the distinctions between the Korean consonants here:
http://phonetics.ucla.edu/appendix/languages/korean/korean.h...
The /k/ sounds I’ve been discussing are the third row down (weight of measure, rope, and large). As an English speaker try to hear a difference between how the consonant is pronounced—it’s extremely difficult to notice.
Our sensitivity to these phonemic distinctions develops at an extremely early age: by one month old infants already begin to stop distinguishing between different sounds that their language slots into the same category as the same “sound” [6]. Infants don’t even babble at this age never mind produce or understand adult speech, but they have already stopped noticing certain differences in speech—that’s how deeply ingrained the way we perceive and produce speech is, and why it’s almost impossible to speak a non-native language without an accent.
(I am only tangentially familiar with Korean phonology so I might be getting some of the details slightly wrong here—please correct me if I’ve misstated anything.)
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unvoiced_velar_stop
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics)
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faucalized_voice
[6] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/171/3968/303 & http://home.fau.edu/lewkowic/web/Eimas%20infant%20speech%20d...
The Korean consonantal distinctions are particular tricky, though, because it’s one consonant in English being not two sounds in Korean but three.
e.g. Moving through a couple cultures... r->l->n and b->p->f or b->v->w might turn "rollerblade" into "lolaweulad"
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The biggest difficulty in speaking Japanese, after wrapping your head around the grammar, is learning "The right way" to say something according to your standing with the person you're talking to. There's several layers of social cues that you have to navigate to speak fluently.
Pronunciation is not necessarily so simple, though: native speakers of every language employ a wide and relatively complicated set of phonological processes unconsciously. Here’s a partial list of the Japanese ones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Phonological...
Unless you’re unconsciously making these pronunciation changes on the fly, you’re going to have a discernible accent. I cringe when I hear English speakers of Japanese who haven’t internalized the simpler processes pronounce words like 人「ひと」as hee-toe and です as deh-sue. I’ve spoken Japanese for ten years and I still pick up something new every time I listen to a native speaker.
Regarding your other point, I always see people mention how complicated it is to learn to use the correct levels of politeness and honorifics in Japanese. But we encode largely the same information in English regarding relative social positions, familiarity with the conversational partner, etc. It’s really not any more complicated than it is in English, and in fact you could argue it’s less so because we primarily convey politeness with indirection and idiomatically. For example, if a waitress hasn’t brought your change at a restaurant after a few minutes and you say ‘Bring me my change now’ it would be incredibly rude. Instead you would usually say something along the lines of ‘Excuse me, I know you’re busy, but if it’s not too much trouble would you mind bringing our change over when you get a chance?’ You start by asking the waitress to excuse you for your imposition, go on to express that you understand the demands on her time, and then ask her (not command her) if she would mind bringing the change (not if she will actually bring it), when she has a chance to do so (not necessarily right this very second)—all despite the fact that you’re the customer and ostensibly she’s waiting on you. Depending on your tone of voice, the implication is that you really do want the change right now so you can leave but that whole song and dance conveys politeness and respect.
In any event, I have never had a problem speaking to practically everyone in Japanese using plain language. The only time I typically use polite language is with absolute strangers or people who seem in a bad mood, and even then I mostly speak in plain form and if your tone of voice is warm it serves to enact some closeness between you that people seem to appreciate. Very occasionally I’ve met a Japanese that seems to be a bit insulted if you speak too familiarly with them, but, honestly, I can usually chalk that up to that particular person just being a bit of a tight ass. If they persist in speaking to you in polite forms then you just switch back to the polite register to make them comfortable. Also, if you speak only in polite language then Japanese have a tendency to think that you only have a rudimentary understanding of the language. I have never used keigo, ever—if you’re in a business setting it might come in handy, but even Japanese themselves have to be instructed in how to use it when they enter corporate jobs. I can’t find the study now, but I was reading a paper that showed that native Japanese speakers have extremely warm attitudes towards foreigners who use keigo in business settings regardless of how proficient their use actually is or how many mistakes they make. If I remember correctly it was more or less irrelevant how well you used it—the Japanese had a high opinion of you simply for attempting to do so.
The “difficulty” of learning any particular language in relation to another is a bit of a meaningless comparison in my opinion. Ultimately, it appears to be the case that all human languages operate according to a common underlying linguistic mechanism—the seeming differences between particular languages are in fact probably actually just different surface realizations of the underlying mechanism with particular options twiddled in various combinations coupled with an idiosyncratic lexicon (i.e., a relatively unique but ultimately arbitrary vocabulary). The nature of the underlying mechanism is the subject of debate, as well as the list of the particular options available, but it seems pretty clear that all languages are utilizing a common underlying cognitive architecture.
That being said, it would seem to me if you define a relative acquisition difficulty metric as something like
D(x, y) = a*O(x, y) + b*P(x, y) + c*L(y) - d*C(x, y)
O(x, y) = cardinality of the set of differences between the language “settings” of x and y
P(x, y) = cardinality of the set of phonemic distinctions present in y but not x
L(x) = cardinality of the lexicon of x
C(x, y) = cardinality of the set of cognates shared by the lexicons of x and y
There’s probably work done on this somewhere but second language acquisition isn’t my area of expertise.
As for pronunciation difficulty, I can tell you that from the standpoint of a native speaker of American English who can also articulate every consonant and vowel in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese phonology is far easier for me than Korean phonology. Japanese really only has one consonant whose place of articulation doesn't exist in English or Mandarin (a voiceless bilabial fricative, which is essentially an /f/ but with two lips instead of the bottom lip against the upper teeth) and five monophthong vowels (their position in the mouth stays the same for the duration of the sound), most of which are pretty standard among languages whose vowels are monophthongs. While Japanese does have pitch accent, so does Korean, and unlike Chinese, pitch almost never affects the meaning of a word in the Japanese spoken in Tokyo (there are a couple exceptions) or in the Korean spoken in Seoul. If you want to sound native, you'll have to spend about the same amount of time in either language learning the pitch contour of each word.
Korean on the other hand has more vowels than Japanese, one of which is now pronounced as a diphthong that is very difficult for most English speakers to pronounce correctly (although it's easy for anyone who knows French and easy enough for anyone who can pronounce /y/). The real issue is that Korean has those tense consonants whose specific manner of articulation doesn't exist in any other language. It's the one part of Korean phonology I do not pronounce correctly. Interestingly, I just came across this on Wikipedia:
'An alternative analysis[2] proposes that the "tensed" series of sounds are (fundamentally) regular voiceless, unaspirated consonants; that the "laxed" sounds are voiced consonants which become devoiced initially; and that the primary distinguishing feature between word-initial "laxed" and "tensed" consonants is that initial laxed sounds cause the following vowel to assume a low-to-high pitch contour – a feature reportedly associated with voiced consonants in many Asian languages – whereas tensed (and also aspirated) consonants are associated with a uniformly high pitch.'
So maybe there is hope for us non-Koreans! But yeah, Korean pronunciation is more difficult for most native speakers of English. Also, the grammar requires a little more memorization than Japanese does since there are more inflectional forms in Korean. On the other hand, the Korean writing system is far simpler than that of Japanese since Koreans don't really use Chinese characters anymore at all. It might also take you a few hours or days longer to learn the Japanese syllabaries than the Korean alphabet. As this thread shows, it's incredibly easy to learn to read and write Hangeul.
I've heard this before but am confused by the fact that children can learn a native accent (which presumably includes those ignored sounds) for a language they're exposed to many years after infancy.
Does that mean that although babies will ignore it by one month old, they're capable of reversing that if the need arises?
/g/ is devoiced word-initially, so you're more likely to think that the word is 'gam'. [1]
Even though the Korean 'normal' [k] is not marked for aspiration, it is too aspirated; it's just that the voice onset time is shorter. [k͈], on the other hand, is unaspirated.
[1] http://linguisticmystic.com/2011/12/31/scuse-me-while-i-mix-...
By the way, Korea is absolutely worth a visit. I think I'm infatuated with it right now. In the short time I got to know a couple of very wonderful people.
e.g. 화장실 - bathroom. You don't need to make a complicated sentence when asking where one is. Just 화장실? is enough and everybody knows you're a foreigner anyways and will know what you mean.
Hello, goodbye, thank you, your welcome, are similarly easy.
Food words are relatively simple and regular and if you drink alcohol there's relatively few to learn about.
I've been there quite a few times and have absolutely loved every minute there.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/spullara/2629936/
Not as entertaining but tries to show you how the various parts are derived from one another. Interesting that n is half of m.
(sorry for the quick transliterations)
This makes sentences more compact in appearance, but it also creates difficulty in creating fonts, since a single alphabet looks slightly different in combination with different alphabets. (For example, Gulim font, a standard sans-serif font, contains 49,284 glyphs according to this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Gulim.)
The actual Hangul (Korean syllabary) characters require about 30 consonants/clusters and 21 vowels/dipthongs which can appear in characters in 9 different layouts. It's much more work than the 26 latin characters, but most of the font design is going to be copy/paste.
So you could say the purpose of New Gulim is not to create a "Korean font" in the sense that a font you can write Korean with, but rather the sense that Koreans can use it to write Korean mixed with Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic, and Greek characters with a unified design between scripts. That's a tall order.
Not quite. While the minimal Hangul font design requires two sets of initial consonants, one set of vowels and two sets of final consonants (often called 2x1x2), it would be very quirky. Many bitmap fonts used the 8x4x8 design or its variant, the commercially available TrueType/OpenType fonts now have more than 30 sets of subtly differing glyphs. It is easier than drawing all 11,172+ glyphs but not much.
Having picked up Hindi/Devanagari more or less by osmosis, I find that this profusion of glyphs means that my brain processes them differently than it does other alphabets (I also read Cyrillic and the Japanese Kanas). The various strokes seem to take on a "feeling" of associated pronunciation that is both intuitive and very, very precise (since every possible aspect of pronunciation is captured by the script). So when I run across bizarrely conjoined characters (like this[2]), I immediately have an intuitive and generally accurate sense of what sound they ought to produce, even if it takes me quite a while to puzzle out exactly why. This is almost the exact opposite of English, for example, where figuring out the characters is the easy part, while figuring out the sound they create is sometimes impossible.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari
[2]: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/JanaSansk...
My understanding, also, is that there are no exceptions to the rules, so it makes it very easy to read and write, which is awesome.
Still it is very straightforward.
"It doesn't produce minimal pairs".
Thus minimal pairs are the king.
Take this word 청령리 (a large transit hub for intercity bus and train travel. The transliteration from that guide is Cheong-ryeong-ri which is completely wrong. It should really be transliterated closer to Cheon-nyeong-gi. If you say that word as that guide has shown you no one will have a clue where you want to go.
I live in Seoul. Non-Korean speakers frequently struggle to tell taxi drivers or to get directions to three different places: 시정 (sijeong - city hall), 신촌 (sinchon - a district in the north) and 신천 (sincheon - a district in the south). First, anyone who hasn't learned 시 is closer to 'shi' than 'see' gets nowhere. Then there is the subtle difference between ㅓ and ㅗ; ㅓ is more like 'audio' than 'eo' and ㅗ is a short 'o' sound. These things take practice. The ㅈ in 시정 becomes more of a 'ch' sound than a 'j' sound. The difference is about the same as the difference in pronunciation between the 'ch' at the start of church to the 'ch' at the end of it in English. Hard to notice, but there is a change in most peoples pronunciation for that. There are people who have been here for years who still get a taxi to the wrong place every now and then.
15 minutes might be enough time to learn the symbols if you are an adult who can already read other languages. A week is more realistic for actually remembering them. A month of practice and you will probably be able to read what people write on bits of paper at a speed that allows them to listen and follow what you say. Learning alphabets isn't too hard but it isn't easy either (I learnt the Mon alphabet in a day with a good teacher).
My way of remembering was to think of 'ㅓ' as the weaker (i.e. less powerful) sound associated with "dumb" or "uh" (same pronunciation), and 'ㅗ' as the stronger sound associated with an exclamation of "oh!" (same as your short 'o' sound reference).
Cyrillic is pretty straightforward, for example.
[1] Not that that's in any way surprising, considering its messy Saxon-Norman-Viking-... history.
(FWIW I speak English to a level that native speakers can't tell it's not my first language unless I trip over words I only know from reading - People ask me, "so where in England are you from" all the time. My French is just about passable - I can get by for basic everyday conversations as long as the other person doesn't speak too fast and they don't mind explaining/rephrasing the occasional sentence. I'd agree that perfecting your French is a lot harder than perfecting your English despite what I've said above.)
Writing in French is difficult to learn because there are many more verb conjugations and tenses, and nouns have often seemingly arbitrary sexes. The silent consonants are fairly consistent and systematic.
Ideally, yes, in the sense that if you were to create an artificial language, you would strive for that (at the beginning at least).
In practice, the speech->text direction isn't nearly as important as text->speech when learning a second language. If you aren't immersed in the environment of the target language, you have to rely on texts in order to acquire vocabulary. And a messy script like English makes that very hard (although not as hard as Japanese). I've been learning English for years and can pass an English proficiency test with a perfect score, but I still make basic mistakes in pronunciation.
(Two Ls make a Y sound in French. And Spanish, for that matter.)
Saxon, French, Latin and Greek words are all readily identifiable by their spelling, unlike say, German or Italian where most spellings have been naturalized.
In many semitic languages, they don't write the vowels, which is no problem if you're versed in the language, but makes it much harder as a learner. (Not to mention the multiple letter forms if you're at the start/middle/end of a word in Arabic, but that's easy to get used to.) I believe there are cases were you _can't_ identify a word without understanding the context of the sentence, but I can't cite proof of that off hand.
It's probably fair to say that most western alphabets, and virtually all contrived alphabets are trivial though.
How about `wind' in English? You need context to see how to pronounce it, and (related) which word it is.
A good example in Arabic would be قرن, which can mean 'horns' or 'century', and (as far as i know, not an expert) doesn't have any related origin.
I imagine if you were writing machine translation software you could pretty easily figure it out statistically from nearby words, but it adds another level of challenge to learning the script.
As an aside; if anyone has any interest in learning the _script_ used by Arabic/Persian, 'The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It' by Awde and Samano is awesome, and you can burn through it with all the exercises in a few dozen hours total. The book makes no attempt at teaching the language, but it's a nice leg-up before you hit the real books, which seem to all do an abbreviated job of teaching the script.
Plus, from a different angle, words which mean the opposite of themselves, such as cleave.
The author no longer authorizes distribution of the image over the internet, however copies can be found with a google search.
Not all Korean letter was made based on this concept but King Sejong who is known as inventor of Korean tried to make the public learn letter and write letter quickly, that requires easily understandable form.
Korean alphabet + American keyboard = a match made in heaven.
Dvorak, to a similar extent, seems to be closest to mimicking this style of typing (although I hear Colemak is better with the keystroke distribution).
1: http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kana-Reading-Japanese-Syll...
....I would be quite interested in that.
as codyrobbins already alluded to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3881388
it expresses the particulars of Korean extremely well, while only so-so mapping to the particulars of other languages. English, as a common example, is a mess in Hangul. It's readable, sometimes with a bit of effort, but completely obliterates certain sounds that have important meanings, or is forced to add other sounds where there simply is none in English (consonant consonant groupings in English end up rendered as consonant vowel consonant in many cases, usually with the all purpose ㅡ (eu) vowel).
I've also long wondered how much of the verbal features of modern Korean is merely a reflection of written Hangul. Much like how English speakers will overemphasize the 't' in 'water' when the spoken form is really a soft 'd'. The hard coupling of spoken Korean to Hangul may help overemphasize certain language features that may not have existed in earlier forms.
Despite all this there's an effort to try and adapt Hangul to languages with similar vowel consonant features. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cia-Cia_language
If you think that's strange, regard Latin, Greek, Arabic and Chinese w/r to Western Europe, Eastern Europe & Russia, the Middle East and Central Asia and East Asia respectively.
Some other interesting notes, modern Hangul is a little simpler than the original form. There's quite a few consonants that have been dropped, and various consonant clusters (many of which make more sense when transliterating foreign languages into Korean as noted above, so it's sad they're gone). However, this makes learning it far easier.
It's alleged that King Sejong created and funded what we'd know today as a linguistic R&D program as a way of improving literacy and education in the country after a plague killed a great number of his subjects. The connection? A treatment for the plague was printed and disseminated throughout the country but the low literacy rate (you had to know how to read and speak Chinese to understand the information) resulted in low adoption of the treatment.
However, for quite some time (a few hundred years) it was overcome by politics and never adopted as the official written form of the language, not really being standardized or formalized to fit the modern dialect until the early 20th century!
It's really worthwhile to learn it if you travel to Korea, or even live in an area with a large Korean population. Why? Once you learn the names of a few foods, it's much easier to read them in Hangul and learning new words (and how to pronounce them) is much easier than learning them via transliteration.
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn...