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Comment by j_lev | Hacker News Reader

You're not the only one that is bothered by the article. The thing that triggered my radar was that the entire thing read like fiction. If it looks like a duck,...

The dictionary sounds like bullshit. North Korean and South Korean are completely different dialects, with different orthography and spelling. Bigger differences than different spellings in English. I can't see a dictionary like that being of any use to his family.

There is no way sources can ever be checked, and that means anywhere from 0 to 100% of the article could be fabricated.

(edit: an analogy to better describe the dubious usefulness of the dictionary, it would be like a native Greek using a French-English dictionary to learn English)

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> The dictionary sounds like bullshit. North Korean and South Korean are completely different dialects, with different orthography and spelling. Bigger differences than different spellings in English. I can't see a dictionary like that being of any use to his family.

Uh, totally wrong there. Might want to read up some more.

There are some minor spelling differences, pronunciation/accent differences. North Korean doesn't use any loan words, so there's a great deal of different terms for ice cream or radio, for example. But they're not totally different dialects. Any South Korean can understand a North Korean TV broadcast, for example.

North Korea uses loan words, albeit from Russia.

English loan words, that is, which South Korean is packed to the brim with these days. South Korean say aiseukeurim, North Koreans say eoreumbosung-i ("ice pudding" or something).

> North Korean and South Korean are completely different dialects, with different orthography and spelling. Bigger differences than different spellings in English. I can't see a dictionary like that being of any use to his family.

I'm actually studying Korean right now, and one of the textbooks I'm using relies on the North Korean dialect. I can attest that the differences are minor, and are mostly limited to things comparable to 'color' in AE and 'colour' BE.

>North Korean and South Korean are completely different dialects

>I can't see a dictionary like that being of any use to his family.

I assume you don't speak any Korean and are talking out of your ass.

The standard Korean used in South Korea and North Korea are both based on the same dialect - Seoul dialect. There's vocabulary differences, but nothing that would prevent a (South) Korean-English dictionary from being useful to a North Korean person.

You're quite right that a dictionary wouldn't be very useful to learn a language from scratch, but if you already understand it a bit and want to expand your vocabulary, or better understand materials you already have access to, it'd be extremely useful.

The article doesn't say "English/South Korean" dictionary, it just says "English" dictionary.

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