People overestimate the difficulty in learning different alphabets (and the assumed difficulty of the languages which use them).
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.
> The additional burden of it using a separate regular alphabet is negligible in comparison.
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?
It's true that learning IPA as well can be rather annoying and time-consuming.
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.
Agreed. When you don't know the language, knowing the alphabet is pretty useless. In Israel I recall being able to read signs.. and have no idea what I was actually reading.
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.
I learned Cyrillic when I spent some time in Macedonia. Being able to read the alphabet was actually very useful, even without any further language knowledge. Being able to read street names, shop names, destinations on buses, etc all made the city much more accessible than without that.
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.
Well, my point was that simply learning the alphabet allows you to get as far as being able to turn that into Espresso, Kapuchino, etc which is hugely useful, even without knowing the language itself.
> 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.
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).
> As for the second sentence, for a person with no background in tonal languages, learning the tones in Mandarin is extremely challenging.
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.
> The biggest mistake of most Chinese learners is taking tones too seriously.
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.)
Eventually, you just start getting the tones right because you speak and listen so much. I can get by native sometimes (limited only by my bad vocabulary) and I've never study tones consciously for words I learn.
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.
"The biggest mistake of most Chinese learners is taking tones too seriously. Really, they aren't that important."
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.
> 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.
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 will second this. A friend was trying to teach me the four different tones of the sh syllable, I had no clue what the hell was going on, they all sounded exactly the same.
I'm not even a native English speaker, I'm Greek, which also isn't tonal.
Interestingly enough, ancient Greek [1] did happen to be tonal even though modern Greek is not. More specifically, it had had pitch accent [2] which is somewhat different than fully tonal languages like Chinese but more involved than languages like English which have stress accent.
Ah, yes. The pronunciation changed over the years and nobody in recent memory can remember when Greek was tonal (I'm not entirely sure when this was), but we got rid of it about 60 years ago? My dad can remember writing in polytonic, but it didn't make any difference to pronunciation by then.
Spoken Chinese is much easier to learn than Japanese or French, in my experience. Coming from English, I find that the grammar isn't that difficult while word order is very relaxed. Since most native speakers have an accent or dialect anyways, there is no pressure to speak in a standard way (I find I'm more understandable when I talk as casually and loosely as possible).
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.
While visiting Israel I picked up the alphabet from the street signs and found it useful for identifying which sherut went to Jerusalem (their signs were in Hebrew only).
That's interesting. I consider the street signs evil. Ignoring streets for which even the Israelis I know don't know how to pronounce the name (for example אבן גברויל which GMaps lists as Ibn Gabriol but ends up as something different, whenever you talk to anyone).
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.
> When you don't know the language, knowing the alphabet is pretty useless.
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?)
Careful with gairaigo. Most of the time it doesn't mean what you think it means. Ever seen an ad for a mansion? In Japanese that refers to a type of apartment. I challenge anyone who has no prior knowledge to guess what 'Delivery Health' means.
Transliterated English is actually very useful for learning Korean, even if the meaning is a little twisted sometimes. Fully 25% of my Korean knowledge is transliterated English. It helps that Korea is probably the country with the highest English-fever in Asia.
Agreed. I memorised Hiragana and Katakana fairly quickly when learning Japanese, and even then, the language itself felt like it had some sort of logic to it (with good justifications for why some things are as they are), which made it easier to follow after learning the alphabets.
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.
> People overestimate the difficulty in learning different alphabets (and the assumed difficulty of the languages which use them).
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.
Yeah, alphabets are usually pretty easy to learn. I can read (and write) the two syllabic Japanese "alphabets" - really syllibaries - which only took a week or two to learn. Of course, you need to practise to get good at it.
Living in TLV for ~11 month now I salute you. It was quite a bit harder for me than '2 hours'. I do agree that knowing the alphabet (alephbet?) doesn't get you very far and the real challenge starts afterwards.
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.
The Cyrillic script[1] and the Armenian alphabet[2] were also devised in similar fashion, and probably many more. It is not unusual for writing systems or alphabets to find widespread usage in this manner.
The Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics is another one. It was developed by a missionary that noticed that when aboriginal where written in latin script the result was often long and awkward.
It's successful because there was no better alternative. Before that you could basically use Chinese characters with similar sounds (horrendously inefficient and distorts meaning of the Chinese characters), or just write in Classical Chinese.
This system gave Korean its own writing system, and a good, simple-to-learn one at that.
The hangul script was also successful because it was a state-sponsored improvement over using the chinese characters for the Korean language. Sometimes it helps to have someone abruptly enforce adoption of a better method.
Not everyone supported it. Although King Sejong, who had it invented in the 1440s, was a big proponent, prominent Korean Confucian scholars opposed it on the basis that it would dilute the sway that Confucian/Chinese culture had on Korea and turn them into barbarians. The real reason was probably that by keeping the writing system so time-consuming to learn, they would be able to control the poor much beter.
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).
Interestingly, when the state tried to get Korean to adopt the new writing system in the 15th century, it failed miserably because of various political and ideological issues. Only later did Hangeul actually begin to gain popularity, and this happened organically.
I think this is the difference between a constructed language and a constructed script. There are several examples of scripts being constructed in a short time period by one or a few individuals, that have worked out great. I don't know any constructed languages that have had comparable success.
I can understand calling Esperanto a "failure" since it didn't achieve its goal of becoming a common international auxiliary language, but how has Klingon failed? Its purpose was to be the language for a fictional sci-fi race.
Having an alphabet, as it does, Korean indeed isn’t hard to learn to read and write. The difficulty is learning how to pronounce it properly—it has a number of distinct consonants that are treated as the same consonant in most other languages and that therefore are extremely difficult for non-native speakers to distinguish and produce properly.
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:
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.)
Yes, that’s exactly the same problem illustrated the other way around. Japanese speakers also fail to make the /l/ and /r/ distinction and it’s a rather stereotypical feature of a Korean or Japanese accent in English. Japanese happens to have sounds for both /f/ and /p/ unlike Korean, but not for /f/ and /h/. So you’ll hear Japanese speakers of English having a hard time producing those two sounds distinctly just like Korean speakers have a hard time with /f/ and /p/.
The Korean consonantal distinctions are particular tricky, though, because it’s one consonant in English being not two sounds in Korean but three.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this mis/near-mapping of phoneme sets can easily result in fantastic corruptions of words as they migrate through various language "lenses" then when reintroduced to their origins sound nothing like the original word!
e.g. Moving through a couple cultures...
r->l->n and b->p->f or b->v->w might turn "rollerblade" into "lolaweulad"
Actually, that’s more or less how the phonology of languages change internally over long periods of time [1]: sets of phonemes merge, split, appear, and disappear. The particular forces driving these changes are varied and complicated, but particular sounds that have adjacencies on various axes twist and enjoin and diverge, dancing about according to constraints that produce surface complexity like in a multibody system. Something about the way I’ve always envisioned phonological change makes me think of Voronoi diagrams [2].
Which is, in fact, strange.
Most languages do not have the v/w distinction, but very few non-native english speakers confuse v with w, especially in write. But Koreans and Japanese tend to confuse r and l even in write.
I am afraid this will be a trivial question now, but does that mean that Korean pronunciation is much harder to learn than Japanese? I often heard that they are very similar languages, and they can certainly sound similar to the uninitiated.
Yes, Korean is much more difficult to pronounce. Japanese pronunciation is extremely simple: 5 vowel sounds, no dipthongs, and a handful of consonants. The only struggle for me as an English speaker was learning not to blend the sounds together or slur. Otherwise it's a piece of cake.
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.
Japanese has a relatively small phoneme inventory, and luckily for English speakers it’s mostly a subset of the English inventory, but there are a few allophonic variations that we don’t have in English.
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:
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.
Japanese and Korean are actually not phylogenically related. In fact they’re both generally considered to be language isolates, which means they don’t seem to be related to any other languages. This may not be strictly true and there are proposals that there could be a link through a hypothetical language family called Altaic—they’re usually considered unrelated, though.
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
where a, b, c, and d are scaling factors, then that might give you some semi-reasonable rough correlation in the form of a “distance” between two languages along various axes. The exact definition of O(x, y) is far from clear, however. And even just having knocked this out I’m realizing that there’s almost an infinite number of other things you could throw in here that you would arguably need to know to claim to have “learned” a language: phonological processes, knowledge of and relative productivity of morphological processes, pragmatics, etc. This is why I’m of the mind that any such measure is of dubious utility, because you would need to take into account a lot of factors—most of which we still don’t fully understand.
There’s probably work done on this somewhere but second language acquisition isn’t my area of expertise.
First of all, Korean and Japanese are very similar. They're in different language families because they are not believed to have been evolutionarily related (more closely than other languages in other families), but they are in fact incredibly similar. This might be partly a result of tons of historical contact between Korea and Japan and/or of both sending scholars to China in ancient times, but the mechanism of their coevolution had to be more involved than that. I don't know enough about it, and I'm not sure if linguists do either. However, the fact remains that the two languages in their current forms are closely related, which is what gurkendoktor was asking about in regards to learning time. While the closed class words and inflectional suffixes don't have related pronunciation, the general structure of the languages are ridiculously similar. Word order is identical in many sentences, both use particles or postpositions to mark the function of nouns, both use topics instead of subjects, both allow you to omit the topic if it can be inferred through context, both have a respect hierarchy built into the grammar, both have tons of pronouns and related categories of family words, both have the adversative passive of Chinese, both are agglutinative in the sense that they allow you to add a noun after a verb phrase to form a relative clause that modifies the noun, both have lots of similarly-pronounced Chinese-derived open class words, both have the rare alveolo-palatal fricatives and affricates in their sound inventories as is found in Mandarin, both make the /h/ consonant a voiceless palatal fricative before [i] or [j], etc. Those are just the similarities I can think of off the top of my head. I don't know much Korean, but I'm sure there are a lot more similarities.
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.
Yes that is true. Korean has many more similar sounding vowels and consonants and more special pronunciation changes whereas if you can pronounce all the hiragana by themselves you can basically pronounce any Japanese word.
Yes, I’m aware that he died, but since it’s still up I was thinking that arguably he still has it? I actually was going to say ‘had’ but I felt that would incorrectly imply that it doesn’t exist anymore. Then I was going to put ‘late’ in front of his name but that sounded kind of stuffy. I guess I should have passivized the sentence since if the subject no longer exists it’s ambiguous whether a “possession” relationship can exist between the subject and the direct object any longer.
> if you pronounce cam with an unaspirated /k/ it may sound slightly odd but you’ll still consider it the same word cam
/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.
Great addition. Anyone who can say "I am only tangentially familiar with Korean phonology" is likely to be leaps and bounds ahead of the majority of the HN community.
> 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'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?
This is why I love Hacker News. Even though this doesn't really have anything to do with startups or technology in general, it's still something that interests the types of people who read Hacker News. One of the big reasons I love HN is the community that contributes to it.
I've just returned from a 15 days trip to Korea. Being able to read Hangul was helpful, especially when trying to read menus, but in most places, road and subway signs were bilingual (English & Korean). In many ways, the country seemed to be light years ahead of other places (I'm from Switzerland).
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.
Did you know the meaning of the words that you translated from writings to "words"? I mean, I could read korean letters and words if I know the alphabet (somewhat) but I dont know what it means anyways.
There's a surprising amount that's in English, and survival words are relatively simple.
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 agree, Korea is sadly way underrated as a tourist destination. Amazingly fun, safe, tons to do (generally speaking). Everything from hiking to nightclubs. Ridiculously good public transport, fun stuff for tourists to do, interesting culture, amazing food.
I've been there quite a few times and have absolutely loved every minute there.
Hindi is also a pretty straightforward language; by which I mean that the written alphabet corresponds exactly to the sounds made when speaking it. When I was in Korea, I used to write korean words in hindi (I did not know the korean alphabet then) because transliterating to english would screw up the pronunciation and unless you get the pronunciation exactly right, the locals just don't understand what you are saying.
Hey, would you be kind enough to email me? My address is in my profile. I’ve been looking for a Hindi speaker of Korean for a while. I’d love to ask you a few questions if you have a moment!
Cool! 15 minutes sounds about right. I learned it over a single pint on my last trip to Seoul. I can tell you navigating the city becomes easier when you start to understand signs like megchu (beer) and tsikin (chicken) :-)
I am not familiar with many languages, but something that is unique about Korean "alphabets" is that alphabets combine to form a character.
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.)
Devanagari (the script which is used to write Hindi and several other Indic languages[1]) is very similar in this respect. A fairly modest number of consonant characters are combined with vowel indicators ("mudras"), which are then augmented with various diacritical flourishes to indicate non-plosive quasi-consonant sounds (what do you actually call those?) such as trailing "R"s and "N"s, vowel nasalisations, etc. Just to make life interesting, consonants can be conjoined to indicate glides between them. There are 1,296 possible permutations of conjoins, and when you consider all the possible permutations of vowel mudras and diacriticals, the glyph library can get a bit crazy. Not dissimilar from Hangul, except that the Indic languages have vastly more phonemes than Korean does.
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.
According to the web page, New Gulim includes all of CJK, for Koreans this means Hanja, which are thousands of Chinese characters that haven't really been used to write Korean since the 19th century.
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.
Oops, forgot about the other character sets. But, I think properly designed fonts require a lot more than what you mentioned. According to this article, for Windows, it requires 11,172. (Second paragraph in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language_and_computers#C...)
> It's much more work than the 26 latin characters, but most of the font design is going to be copy/paste.
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.
But you would still copy/paste to create subtly different glyphs, right? Just like I can copy and paste parts of Han characters to make 村 校 林 枚 様 機 横 (look at the left half), with slight modifications as necessary. (At a quick glance, I suspect the font I use has four variations of the 木 radical among those seven characters).
The representation in unicode is also interesting. I never knew there was a range of 11140 characters for encoding the different Korean (Hangul) characters. See: http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/korean_hangul_unicode.html
It also has a cute javascript that lets you combine syllables into a character.
The other thing interesting about the Korean alphabet is that the symbols take "notches" also have the same mouth formation. The notch is an indication to use the same mouth shape, but to use a "harder" sound. So the G sound and K sound have a similar mouth shape, as well as the D sound and the T sound, the J and CH sounds.
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.
There are exceptions to those rules, hundreds of them. ㅊ(chieut/치읓) as the bottom consonant has a really difficult and varying set of rules for different words, different consonants before and different consonants as the start of the next word.
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).
When I was young, I had a problem learning to differentiante between the 'ㅓ' and 'ㅗ' sounds.
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).
Yup. I happen to be an American, English-only speaker, and a friend was able to teach me the Korean alphabet during highschool AP chemistry (oh, and I still managed to get a 5 on the exam). It's really that easy.
Most alphabets are trivial. It is only latin that tends to be hard, especially french or english latin (german to lesser intent), because of loose correlation between letters and sounds.
I'd be careful about that generalization, since a fair number of scripts require you to be able to speak the language before you can really even transliterate properly.
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.
> 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.
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.
Ideally there is a one-to-one mapping between text and speech. To me at least French is more difficult in thespeech-to-text direction (because of all those mute letters at the end of most words esp. verb forms that sound the same parler, parlez, parlais, parlaient, parlai, parlé) while English is more difficult in the text-to-speech
This is definitely true, though not such a big deal for basic understanding in practice, as the near-homophones usually have only subtly different meanings. I also don't often find myself having to transcribe stuff, and if I do, I can usually ask the speaker to check my spelling. On the other hand, reading something and immediately being able to pronounce it with some accuracy is very helpful, but attempting that with English words and especially names ("Cholmondeley" anyone?) often leads to unintentionally bizarre results.
(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.)
> Ideally there is a one-to-one mapping between text and speech.
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.
English is very difficult to learn to pronounce from the writing, or to write from the pronunciation because the different words stem from a large number of roots, each with their own pronunciation and conjugation peculiarities.
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.
I'm sure it's cold comfort to someone learning it, but I've always liked having English history baked into the language.
Saxon, French, Latin and Greek words are all readily identifiable by their spelling, unlike say, German or Italian where most spellings have been naturalized.
French pronunciation might be okay, but it's definitely quite difficult the other way round because many words have some parts which just change how the rest is pronounced or have no sound at all.
Loanwords can be interesting, though. I remember asking the proper pronunciation of "poulet super grill" and getting two different answers concerning "grill."
(Two Ls make a Y sound in French. And Spanish, for that matter.)
There is a similar guide to hangul with information arranged in the shape of the periodic table of elements, the "periodic table of hangul": http://www.aboutletters.com/pfaq.html. I found it to be a reasonably handy reference that logically compiles all the information in one image as opposed to this guide's gradual introduction of vowels and consonants mixed in batches.
The author no longer authorizes distribution of the image over the internet, however copies can be found with a google search.
Well this explains how my Korean friend in college could type touch type in Korean and English on an American keyboard. I didn't know that Korean had an alphabet, I thought it was pictograms or whatever.
Modern Korean has 24 alphabets, plus 2 letters (ㅐ,ㅔ) each of which is technically a combination of two other letters but usually treated as a single letter. Guess how many keys the American keyboard reserves for English alphabets? 26. No need to shift keys around or rely on complicated modifier keys, unlike even some European keyboards.
Korean alphabet + American keyboard = a match made in heaven.
What makes Korean touch typists really fast is the semi-regular symbol construction. Unlike an English keyboard (whether Dvorak or Qwerty), the Hanja consonants are primarily on the left while the vowels are on the right. So you typically have an alternating typing rhythm which can make typing extremely fast.
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).
before Korean was invented, Chinese letters are used in Korea. Korean was invented based on the form of mouth that need to speak that sound. For example to say 'ㄱ', your mouth should be form like that.
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.
Some scripts are surprisingly easy to pick up. If anyone is interested in the Japanese scripts (hiragana/katakan), this book[1] will truly teach them to you in 6 hours, total. I started reading it, and thought it moronic, but as I started writing a review of why it sucked, I realised that I could recall everything perfectly...
Korean (letter) is easy. Korean (language) is quite difficult. There are many irregular syntax and postposition. Also, there are many rules for a prolonged sound.
Modern Korean no longer distinguishes a prolonged sound at least in the written form. Virtually all words that cannot be set apart without a prolonged sound have been changed to those that can. For example, a short 이 ("teeth") and a long 이 ("two") are now homonym in most dialects of Korean; the former 이 has many synonyms like 이빨 or 치아 however, so they can be often distinguished without a context.
yeah... that's a bit more difficult. i picked up the korean alphabet in an afternoon, and was able to read out loud almost any korean text put in front of me. after studying the language for a few more months, i was still only at a very low beginner level when it came to recognizing anything i read. i think it's one of the more difficult languages to learn.
That's what I feared. Unless you are willing to commit time/effort to really learn the language, I fear the usefulness of this is limited to impressing friends and staff at Korean restaurants.
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.
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.
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.