History of Hangul
zkorean.com
zkorean.com
I found this old comment that explains it better than I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28287811
Unicode simply lists all possible combinations in dictionary order starting from U+AC00. So you can take any code point and split out the 초성, 중성 and 종성 using simple arithmetic, just like you can figure out Latin alphabets from their ASCII codes.
My understanding is that there are two possible unicode encodings of Korean, one of which (MacOS) is sound by sound instead of syllable by syllable (Windows). This is why Korean UTF-8 filenames from MacOS appear broken on modern Windows machines.
Having said that, MacOS also made the strange choice of expressing Hangul using the Hangul Jamo (by sound) Unicode block even when there are equivalent precomposed symbols in the Hangul Syllables block. Encoding each sound individually takes up 2-3 times more storage, just like with accented characters in Latin. Besides, if you just list sounds and rely on them to be combined automatically, what do you do when you legitimately want to write a sequence of uncombined sounds, like ㄱㅏㅁ instead of 감?
Sure, Unicode isn't the Platonic ideal of a character encoding. It has warts, legacy features, and.. and it is a universal encoding of all human writing. What an exceptional and incredible accomplishment.
Could you replace it with something better designed?
No. No, you cannot. You can in principle design something better, but that's a completely different, quixotic, and useless task.
It's also far from impossible to implement Unicode 'correctly', folks not only can, but do, routinely. It's extensively well documented, there's example code, it's just work.
Also, if your game plan for Unicode-D includes removing the most beloved and consistently demanded feature, emoji: then no, that person in particular is not capable even in principle of designing something better. That game has been lost before it began.
It isn't (and never can be).
> Could you replace it with something better designed? No. No, you cannot. You can in principle design something better,
Something that some people fail to consider, is that one character set is not suitable for all purposes. Unicode is not very good for most purposes though. I think Extended TRON Code has many advantages, although trying to use Extended TRON Code (or some other alternative) for everything would be almost as bad as using Unicode for everything, but in different ways.
> Also, if your game plan for Unicode-D includes removing the most beloved and consistently demanded feature, emoji
I think that colourful emoji should not belong in the character set for text. I also do not want colourful emoji on my computer.
Could be 2 sentences.
Language designed by a king.
Also its sad that they put the years 1393-1897 first. As if it took 500 years.
On page 3 we learn that 4 characters are not used anymore. We dont learn which characters, or why just uslesss knowledge.
Was this written by AI?
Another alternate form is SKATS (Standard Korean Alphabetic Transliteration System) which is used for representing Korean in Morse Code.
https://korean.stackexchange.com/questions/3417/morse-code-w...
(apparently the Wikipedia article was taken down --- that discussion captures the salient points)
Unfortunately I can't help much with learning grammar as I never dove into actually learning Korean due to a dislike of how it sounds. There's the "Tae Kim Japanese Grammar"-like approach for a Korean grammar guide at: https://www.howtostudykorean.com/ although I'm not a big fan of how overly simplified (and sometimes wrong due to the simplification) Tae Kim's approach for Japanese was. So I can't attest as to whether How To Study Korean makes the same mistakes or not.
As for writing - Korean is simple enough to read/write that you can simply find any Korean news source and practice writing the sentences as you read them.
You could also try checking the Korean-learning subreddit out as they have a lot of resources in one of their pinned threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/hw4gy0/the_ultimate...
You can do exactly the same with other scripts, e.g. Japanese hirigana and katakana, which are fairly easy to learn, and also Arabic, which looks difficult, but is definitely learnable in an hour.
Japanese has similar stuff with their u-dropping, but not as complicated as Korean.
People get lazy - especially natives who don't get confused because it's how most natives will talk. For example, every word ending in "ing" in your comment could drop the "g" sound when spoken. Plenty of English speakers do that when speakin' and not many people would think anythin' of it until a frustrated person learnin' English asks why nobody is pronouncin' the endin' "g". Droppin', changin', and blendin' sounds is why learning a language by listenin' to natives speakin' is so important instead of crammin' textbooks all day.
Some might consider this a regional thing/accent and I'd argue that it both is and isn't. To the extent I tried to illustrate it would likely get seen as an accent but the occasional droppin' of it is somethin' I've heard across so many different English accents that I'd argue it isn't only an accent thing.
In the US it's mostly associated with a Southern accent and in England it would be the English Midlands like Brummie or Mancunian.
Ha, one of my main motivations for wanting to learn Korean is how beautiful it sounds to me. Funny how that goes, diametrically different subjetive perceptions.
Making it because I believe there's lots of opportunity for high quality Korean learning content.
Also found it annoying that the majority of content out there does not mention other quality resources since they want to keep you in their own (lacking) ecosystem to sell you on their books, coaching sessions, Anki vocabulary cards or whatever it is.
Want to improve my own Korean by teaching it to others.
Also making a site currently that aims to gamify the learning with flashcards, similar to some(!) questions you might see on Duolingo but with your flashcards as a base. Making learning with flashcards more fun and efficient.
I liked BillyGo's videos as a resource in the beginning. The apps I have on my phone to learn are Naver Dictionary, Anki and Migii. Didn't like any other apps I found.
It’s extremely unfortunate but in the year 2024, there are still close to no language learning apps that will actually help you acquire a foreign language. I’ve been in this space for about 6 years and the only I can recommend are Anki (which isn’t even a LL app) and some more obscure ‘comprehensible input’ sites. Outside of that, there’s Netflix, Spotify, Audible and real life human interaction (but none of those are LL apps!)
It's happened to italki (now iKnow), Memrise, DuoLingo, and a few sites that were so short-lived I no longer remember what they were called.
My takeaway is that language learning apps are a lot like dating apps. They profit less if people actually learn a language and so can't be too good at their job because they'll bleed users faster than they can gain them - similar to dating apps. It needs to work just well enough that users are tricked into believing it is working but not so well that it actually works for most people.
It seems like the ETA before enshittification begins is about 2~3 years. If you're an early enough adopter you might actually benefit from it but you have to be willing to jump ship and not fall for the engagement/gamification tactics that keep you sticking around after it has stopped providing any value.
I spent way too long 'watering my garden' on Memrise before I looked around and noticed all of the once useful community-providing mnemonics were gone, you couldn't correct bad definitions anymore, it was difficult to actually speak to anyone else in the community (unless you could find them on the forums), and eventually I stopped using it altogether. The community I had signed up for and was a huge part of Memrise's success no longer existed.
This is actually a remarkably common failure pattern for a lot of language learning apps. Devs see Anki and think "I'm gonna do it better! I'm gonna build Anki, but for a specific language and make it a web app." ... I've lost count how many of these I've seen over the years!
> It seems like the ETA before enshittification begins is about 2~3 years
It's funny, I actually learned the term "enshittification" specifically from friends of mine who were Memrise users. It's honestly a textbook example of the phenomena.
Negativity aside though, I'm actually pretty optimistic about this space despite all that I've seen so far. I think that there's genuinely room to build great language learning software that people will really benefit from. I'm just really pessimistic about most of the people working in the space. Without trying to exagerrate, I'd estimate that probably less than 10% of people working in the language learning industry are actual language learners (at best, they might've learned English as a kid). When you're not actively, seriously learning a language, you become numb to the problems of people who actually care about becoming fluent and just end up building tinder-esque games to addict people with.
This might be why some of the best language-learning content I have seen is from national broadcasters like YLE in Finland. There, once a foreigner learns the language from that material, they then become a consumer of the broadcaster’s main content.
I don't want to recommend the specific app I used, because it's the only one I tried, and I don't know how well it compares to other, similar apps. But there are a bunch of story-based language learning apps on App Stores. My suspicion is that most of them work relatively well, particularly compared to more typical modern language learning apps like Duolingo.
Unlike gamified apps like Duolingo, you do need to actually have the motivation to regularly use them, though. They're not going to entice you with funny animations and points and leaderboards and notifications and all of those things.
That's the gist of it. Never in history there was so much content in foreign languages and education material available that easily and for free, including not only writing but audio too (songs, movies). The thing is one has to go through it, and it's taking effort over a long time to get good, which is why most quit.
(Hardcore linguaphiles are aware of these books, and have been one of the major demographics in the ebook filesharing scene that led to LibGen and Anna’s Archive. But I’m talking about the ordinary people you constantly see on e.g. Reddit who are just moving to another country, have to learn the language, and assume that one uses an app for that.)
It shines mainly if you have PDFs of the content you are learning from which to write flashcards. The best part for language learning is that, while doing reviews, you have some options to generate mnemonics and examples, it was super-helpful to me while learning Georgian!
It's also unfortunate that what was originally a purely phonemic script was gradually transformed into a morphophonemic system. The changes that happened to the language post Sejong were also accommodated in a much more ad-hoc manner than the original elegant design.
(To be fair, the original took years of research to get that final design! But, all the more reason to keep it up to date, no?)
Here's another one that shows standalone jamo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul#/media/File:H...
So, basically, all the consonant jamo were simple geometric shapes, with more straight lines and fewer curves. For vowels, what is today treated as a line with a stroke was actually a combination of a line and a dot (the dot itself being a glyph for a vowel that has since disappeared from the language).
It's one of the few writing systems currently in use that was deliberately designed, instead of occurring naturally over time. This means that any similarities and relationships between symbols that you might find are probably intended, not accidental. Noticing these similarities is key to quickly learning Hangul, as it greatly reduces the number of distinct patterns you need to memorize. It's also fun for programmers who like puzzles. :)
Specifically, the symbols reflect phonological features like place-of-articulation.
In general, such a writing system is called featural:
A Cherokee man named Sequoyah ended up serving as a soldier in one of the early conflicts between English settlers and other Native American groups. In this case, his people were on the side of English settlers against rival tribes (see [2]), so he was serving alongside English soldiers in the conflict. He saw them reading and writing - something he couldn't do, since the Cherokee language had no written script at the time - and went "wait this seems like it would be pretty useful".
So Sequoyah, who until this point had never encountered a writing system, decides he's going to make one. He starts by trying to create a symbol for every word, but decides that's too difficult, so he switches to symbols for syllables instead. It took him ten years to finish it, but once he did, it was adopted by nearly every speaker of Cherokee within only a few years. It's still the primary writing system for the Cherokee language today.
There are other syllabaries, both naturally occurring and deliberately created, but most of them don't show subpatterns that represent the sounds that make up each syllable. Cherokee looks a lot like the Japanese kana. Which is not surprising, because both are syllabaries designed to overcome the difficulty of a fully ideographic writing system (kanji in the case of Japanese).
The academic consensus seems to be that Sejong had a lot of personal involvement in the creation of Hangul, though. He was a quintessential nerd, after all, who didn't have much patience with the conservative officials who got in the way of his nerdy projects.
Plus you should look at Hangul as a political action. Educating the commoners creates a bourgeoisie class that can be the king’s allies against the noble and bureaucratic classes. People who can read laws and write complaints are less subject to the whims of corrupt local officials.