Welcome back class. Today's lesson will be on language.
Hangul
The Korean alphabet or Hangul was invented in 1441. Hangul consists of 24 letters-14 consonants and 10 vowels. It is a syllabary alphabet, in which symbols are combined to create syllables. At least one vowel and one consonant are combined to make a syllable and each syllable is written separately. If you would like to see and hear the letters, click HERE. Hangul can be written vertically or horizontally. An example of a Korean word written in Hangul is below and means "family":
It is hard to Romanize Korean because there is no universal standard and some of the Korean sounds don't exist in English. The Korean government is trying to make a standard and in this case "family" is "gajok."
Hangul has been described as the most logical language writing system in the world. The simplicity of it has led Korea to enjoy one of the higest literacy rates in the world.
That being said....I am trying to learn at least some phrases in Korean. If anyone can recommend a tutor or on-line program that you found effective, please email me or post in the comments. My cousin Brian has offered to speak only Korean to me, but I'm not quite there yet :)
Thanks!
2 comments:
We used some of the free podcasts available on iTunes. I listened to them at work and when I was driving. Some are much better than others, but I listened to a couple and got a good sampling of basic words and some slang. Also, certain words are only appropriate for certain ages, such as hi versus hello. The podcasts were good for alerting us to certain language customs to brush up on.
I obviously didn't become fluent, but it was very helpful to at least understand a little more about how the language was constructed, read, and used.
There are two good websites that will convert English to Hangul and vis versa.
http://translate.google.com/translate_t?hl=en#
and
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/
We prefer the Google site.
To cover our bases, we created purse sized flash cards with tons of phrases and number constructions in hangul (and the translation in English for us) that we thought we might need or things we knew we wanted to see or buy. When we got into a language bind, we were able to pull them out and point to the phrase we needed. I'm pretty sure we would still be looking for the bus stop in Suwon without them.....
I'm popping in from the Holt board... great blog! I've been trying to learn Korean as well! I'm using koreanclass101.com ... I'm getting the basic phrases down - I think!
I'll be adding your blog to my reader!
(ps - love love love that hanbok!)
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