On June 30 2010 23:21 Peekay.switch wrote: All right, I got a legitimate question that will sound very retarded, but since we're kind of on topic.
What does a Korean keyboard looks like? How does it work sort of? I'm just kind of curious in general how they manage to deal with this problem =o
The Korean keyboard layout looks like this:
The consonants are on the left and the vowels are on the right. As you're typing, the input system automatically figures out if the consonant you just put in is an initial consonant or a final one so you just keep typing. In general, the typing is left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand, etc. so I find that touch typing in Korean is faster than in English.
I feel I have to also chime in in defense of Rosetta Stone.
1. It is very good as a piece of software. 2. It is MUCH better than learning language in a classroom (which people have been doing wrong for a very long time). 3. It's true that the absolute best way to learn a language is still total immersion, that is, to go live in a country that speaks the other language and immerse yourself. Barring this, I feel that Rosetta Stone comes in as a close second-best choice.
That said, Rosetta Stone is very expensive. Very expensive. If you want to use it to learn a language instead of total immersion, I recommend against paying for it. If someone else will pay for it for you instead, like an employer, university, or public program, then so much the better for your wallet. As the OP said, you must stick with it or you're not going to learn/retain anything. Learning a language in any manner has to be a habitual discipline like most other developmental activities.
My credentials: I've studied Spanish in a classroom as well as with Rosetta Stone, allowing me to compare, and I'm married to a language teacher who is fluent in Spanish.
I don't see any vertical lines above the ㅇ in these examples. It looks more like ㅇ than ㅎ.
It's 예. 혜 is "hyeh" ㅎ is the 'h' sound.
Anyways, a native Korean living in Korea can eeeeeeeeeasily tell the difference between a native Korean and a Korean that's living in some western country. It's kind of embarassing really
I don't see any vertical lines above the ㅇ in these examples. It looks more like ㅇ than ㅎ.
You see a small vertical line above the ㅇ in that image simply because it's using a different typeface. Before the invention of printing, all writing in Korean was done with ink and a brush, so different writing styles developed. Three of these were carried into the age of printing and further into computerized text. The default style for web browsers is a simpler style that is easier to read and distinguish characters at smaller sizes. The one used in the image is slightly more stylized.
Just think about the difference between serif fonts like times new roman and sans serif fonts like arial, with respect to the Latin character set, if that helps to understand the difference.
Stumbled upon some more confusion. How do you pronounce ㅢ ?
@javiskefka, that makes a lot of sense so thanks for this Yeh, I'm aware that the computerised version may be a little different from the written version. It's just that it takes quite some time and effort to learn each word or individual syllable so I'm worried about wasting a lot of time learning the wrong thing.
I don't see any vertical lines above the ㅇ in these examples. It looks more like ㅇ than ㅎ.
It's 예. 혜 is "hyeh" ㅎ is the 'h' sound.
Anyways, a native Korean living in Korea can eeeeeeeeeasily tell the difference between a native Korean and a Korean that's living in some western country. It's kind of embarassing really
Actually they have a really hard time with me until I tell them I don't speak Korean well, the first thing I get is always rapid-fire Korean.
And to reinforce the point, because everyone has made it confusing-- Fantistic (lol spelling errors in your name though): Yes, you're correct, and you have been the whole time.
On July 01 2010 06:46 Fantistic wrote: Stumbled upon some more confusion. How do you pronounce ㅢ ?
It's sort of a cross between 'oo' and 'ee' with very little emphasis on the 'oo', which is 'ui' I guess. This kind of turns out to sound pretty much identical to 이 (ee) half the time.
ie. 오늘의 and 오늘이 are pretty much said the same, "oh-neul-ee" when said fast.
On June 30 2010 13:49 grobo wrote: Also, i'm curious about those government classifications that says that Korean is a category 4 language, is there a site somewhere that lists all these different classifications?
Im curious about this too. Where can I find more info on this?
Two things that I found to be hugely helpful was a flashcard program like mnemosynehttp://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/ where it uses the best known algorithms to help your recollection, with pre built databases for many topics, like Korean (it's free).
Second one is Pimsleur's langauge learning tapes, they also use algorithm to gauge the best time to remind you of something, and I found it extremely useful.
I also found Rosetta to be fun and useful and I increased my vocabulary with it.
None of these methods are by themselves or perhaps even together sufficient to learn a language for me, but they are all still excellent boosts, with the chief advantage being that they are sufficiently dissimilar to getting out there talking to people that I can do both with enthusiasm without feeling drained, they are mostly vocab builders for me, but if you have poor pronunciation then perhaps you won't find them helpful.
Mnemosyne > Pimsleur > Rosetta But Rosetta is easier than Pimsleur which is easier than Mnemosyne
How is chatting on a webcam for learning language? I meant to try it but never did.
On July 01 2010 02:36 Tal wrote: Interesting thread - I'm learning Chinese (while living in China), which is going ok. My main problem is that while I can read pinyin, I can't read Chinese characters, which cuts out a lot of potential learning.
On the other hand, one of the smartest people I know have tried to learn the Chinese characters, at a time when they weren't working (just studying Chinese), and they said it was very difficult, which has made me focus on conversation.
How does the Korean written language compare to the Chinese? I guess it's somewhat easier, but is it still a hard slog?
Korean script 'hangul' will take you about 2 hours to learn the basics to read and write, not that you will suddenly know the grammar, meanings and have perfect pronounciation etc, but it is that straightforward.
Its been said in this thread already, but Korean can't be understood by any other language, but we have virtually identical grammar to the Japanese. So if a Korean learns Japanese or vice-versa, its pretty straightforward, but if we meet for the first time, we won't know what the fuck the other person is saying. While Korea is grouped with the Ural-Altaic group: Mongols, Turks, Hungary, Fins and Japanese, I've met Mongolians as well and I have no fucking idea what they were saying as well. But, I can see that we are all from central Asia and were all at one point savage barbarians born with green bums.
Many modern western words are the same or similar to the Japanese as they were introduced to Korea during Japan's occupation to Korea (battery,newspaper), whereas many very old words (king, princess) are the same as mandarin.
Korea didn't have it's own script until after King Sejong the Great commissioned it back in the 14th century, so it was only Chinese. Korean's are very proud of this heritage from the Chinese and all classical texts are in Chinese and as mentioned in the previous posts, many Korean words have their root meaning in Chinese, such as English does in Latin, but the pronounciation from these root Chinese words are completely Korean. The use of these Chinese characters in Korean is called hanja and every Korean person's name has a corresponding hanja meaning behind it.
Nowadays hanja as a Chinese script is not used frequently but in newspaper headlines and sprinkled in text, but anyone who graduated from highschool will have a knowledge of hanja as it gets taught from elementary school and is a sign of very high education; for some Korean Chairmen have their Korean name cards not in Hangul, but completely in Hanja. But my wife who graduated from law, without knowing hanja, you couldn't get through your Korean law texts as the hanja is not sprinkled, but very much a part of the text for understanding.
Hangul is a very easy to learn (the Korean script) but Korean is not an easy language to just pick up, but I'm sure you'll find it a very surprising language that has a lot of words that identify so many types of emotional states. Plus, Korean girls love foreign guys who speak Korean keke. As stated by Rek, who is both an Angel and Devil to the local Seoul girl population.
Cool post, Atom! Thanks for this. I don't think language isolate in the linguistic sense means that someone who speaks a different language won't understand you though. I speak Mandarin but I can't understand a damn thing when a Fukianese person is speaking their dialect, but they share the same language ancestry... I think. I could be wrong
Really cool that China/Japan/Korea influenced each other so much in literature/history/culture though. I really like the culture of all 3 countries. It's just too bad my Chinese ancestors way back when created such an awesome looking yet ridiculously memory intensive form of writing . I'm really fluent in Mandarin, but my writing sucks.... I was born in the USA and just never see Chinese writing. Sigh. I've forgotten more characters than I currently know lol.
Learn hangul before you learn anything else. Korean romanization does not have a widely accepted standard (like romaji for Japanese, or pinyin for Mandarin). Because of the many pronunciation/spelling nuances in Korean, people romanize it differently (romanization by spelling, romanization by pronunciation etc). It just gets confusing. If you learn hangul first (which is really easy) then you save yourself the trouble because you match Korean hangul to the sounds, not Korean hangul to a romanization to a sound.
Oh man. I love languages. If I can get my damn browser to display the characters I might try and take a whack at some rudimentary Korean, otherwise I can only assume that Korean is homogeneous boxes.
I got all tingly when I red the OP, well done on that post.
I myself studied quite a few languages. Obviously dutch because I live there. English came rather quick as most of my interrests like music and gaming were infact in english. I self-learned myself swedish as I got a taste for folk-metal music. Learned some finnish ( not past the basic level though ).
Having that said, you do need to have a lot of motivation to learn a new language. My first self-taught language swedish was easy in syntax ( to me the easiest grammar known in any germanic-scandinavian language ) and took me only 2 weeks to learn. Finnish however took me over 3 months just to get the grammar sorted out mildly. ( Imagine doing a sudoku while reading a foreign newspaper hanging upside down, thats the difficulty of finnish to foreigners like you and me ).
I started out learning korean on Rosetta stone ( I'm a cheap college student, you don't really need to ask how I got it ). And it was really easy to start learning the basic grammar. Much faster than I have done from books and speaking with swedish people.
Indeed, it isn't greater to get the complete language nailed down. It lays the basic foundations much faster than traditional methods in my eyes though ( although you do need some help of a dictionairy to completely understand all of the words they just throw at you ).
My basic goal is to understand the korean commentators. Thats all I could ever ask for. A long road ahead but I'll get there in a year or so.
Again, great topic and well written OP. Good luck to all of you trying to learn korean.
If anybody here wants some basic Korean lessons over MSN or something, I can help out. I'm a westerner who has been learning (mainly by myself) for a while, and I have plenty of free time at the moment.
Feel free to send me a message with your MSN details
mnemosyne (open-source!), or a similar flash card program is a must-have for learning Korean.
I have a decent sized Korean mnemosyne database if anybody wants a copy of it.
koreanclass101 (www.koreanclass101.com) is a pretty good online resource, as well.
I strongly recommend anyone who has been thinking about learning Korean to go ahead and start! There's nothing to lose in spending a couple of hours learning the writing system, hangul.
On July 01 2010 11:50 StorkHwaiting wrote: Cool post, Atom! Thanks for this. I don't think language isolate in the linguistic sense means that someone who speaks a different language won't understand you though. I speak Mandarin but I can't understand a damn thing when a Fukianese person is speaking their dialect, but they share the same language ancestry... I think. I could be wrong
Pretty much the only reason to call Mandarin, Fukianese, etc dialects of the Chinese language instead of related languages of the same family is for political reasons. Because mainland China's been a single political entity for so long and whichever ethnic group that has held the political power has made stamping out minority culture such a priority over the years, it's unpopular to evaluate those languages by the same criteria that lead linguists to classify French and Spanish as distinct language of the Romance family, for example. You should follow your common sense when you feel that something seems sketchy when a supposedly related language to the one you speak is completely unintelligible to you.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i248.photobucket.com/albums/gg168/owbee/Mylinguistics/KoreanKeyboardLayout.png)
