History of Hangul

https://zkorean.com/hangul/history_of_hangul

by teleforce • 2 years ago

103 55 2 years ago

I did not realize this site was still in operation- I used to use it quite a bit in college over a decade ago. Sidenote that if you are a tech minded person who has a strong interest in Korean, feel free to reach out. I am pretty easy to find online and I’m working on some Korean language related projects.

natdempk• 2 years ago

Anyone know if there is a particularly great app/website out there for learning Korean? Ideally opinionated, low/no "figure out what to learn yourself", Anki + AI-powered for maximum gain/seamless review/ease of getting more reading + writing variety, and easy to use on-the-go/on-mobile.

Nadya3• 2 years ago

Anki for vocabulary building, Ryan Estrada's comic for learning to read Hangul (https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/) as it sticks true to its promise. Over 8 years ago I spent 15 minutes learning how to 'read' Hangul. To this day I can still slowly sound things out and, at the least, read people's names. It truly is a fantastic writing system although I do sometimes struggle with which vowel is which that's 100% an issue of only having spent 15 minutes learning.

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...

qingcharles• 2 years ago

It's amazing that something that can look so alien to Western eyes is actually pretty straightforward once you try to learn it. I did the same and learned Hangul so I can at least sound things out and do some basic Internet searches etc.

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.

sundarurfriend• 2 years ago

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.

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.

n_plus_1_acc2• 2 years ago

I think LingoDeer is generally considerrd a very good app to learn CJK. You can start with no prerequisites at all.

bryanhogan• 2 years ago

I'm building https://tolearnkorean.com/ , but it's far from finished currently, only meaningful content is an introduction to Hangul so far.

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.

joshdavham2• 2 years ago

Anyone know if there is a particularly great app/website out there for learning Korean?

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!)

Nadya3• 2 years ago

Every now and again a site exists that has a massive community, tons of resources, ways to speak with other learners, ways to meet language exchange partners, and are greatly successful. Then all of that gets gutted for what is essentially a worse version of Anki but for the web when the company runs out of funding and has to start turning a profit somehow. This burns the community and the people providing most of the value move elsewhere.

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.

InsideOutSanta2• 2 years ago

I've been successful in learning a foreign language using an app that basically consisted of reading increasingly complex stories.

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.

n_plus_1_acc2• 2 years ago

Out of these 4 basic components reading, listening, writing and speaking, it's speaking that is by far the hardest. But there's no computer that can accurately detect nuances in pronunciation and tone much like a native teacher can. This also applies to vacabulary choices and grammar.

PrismCrystal2• 2 years ago

What is sad, is that there are already whole generations who think one must learn with an app, and are completely unaware of self-teaching textbooks from traditional publishers like Routledge, Assimil, Teach Yourself, etc. These books don’t work for everyone because learning styles are different, but they do work well for some segment of learners, yet with the decline of the physical bookshop, many young people may have never seen them.

(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.)

thinkingofthing• 2 years ago

Self-promo: I'm working on www.flashka.ai , the Anki + AI that you might be looking for :)

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!

glenngillen• 2 years ago

http://letslearnhangul.com/

iluvcommunism• 2 years ago

감사합니다!

kijin5• 2 years ago

For those wondering why OP linked to the first part of the history page instead of the main page, the history is indeed one of the distinguishing features of Hangul.

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. :)

senkora2• 2 years ago

This means that any similarities and relationships between symbols that you might find are probably intended

Specifically, the symbols reflect phonological features like place-of-articulation.

In general, such a writing system is called featural:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_writing_system

rachofsunshine• 2 years ago

There are a few other writing systems that were deliberately created. My favorite is the Cherokee syllabary [1].

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creek_War

kijin5• 2 years ago

IMO Tolkien's Tengwar is the closest to Hangul. The shapes of the consonants represent the place and manner of articulation, such that similar sounds look similar on paper. Vowels are written as diacritics above the consonants, with the result that each complete letter represents a syllable.

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).

corimaith• 2 years ago

Kind of amazing too that it was personally created by King Sejong himself. Even today there aren't many people who can do such thing, let alone a monarch whose handd would have been filled by other duties.

hyeonwho42• 2 years ago

There are ... speculations that King Sejong was not fully independent in the creation of Hangeul. He may have delegated parts of the task to courtly scholars. (But all the evidence either way has been lost to history, and so speculation it remains.) There are a few "historical" dramas which make this their premise.

labster• 2 years ago

Admittedly most of my impressions are from watching K-dramas but I get the impression that the monarch is somewhat superfluous in bureaucracy-heavy systems like in Joseon and China — and that the government was generally happiest when the kings did nothing. All they have is free time and education.

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.

senkora2• 2 years ago

Hangul is great for computer-entry, but the data representation is a little tricky, because syllables are treated as a single glyph and there are many syllables.

I found this old comment that explains it better than I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28287811

kijin5• 2 years ago

The data representation is fairly straightforward once you're familiar with the composition rules, at least for modern Korean.

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.

hyeonwho42• 2 years ago

초성 = initial sound (consonant) 중성 = middle sound (vowel) 종성 = final sound (consonant)

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.

lgessler2• 2 years ago

This has led to work showing that models can do better sometimes if you decompose these into their constituent characters, e.g.: https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.472.pdf

bobthepanda• 2 years ago

A paper on Korean where the main acronym is BTS has got to be intentional, right?

samatman• 2 years ago

Rare WalterBright L taken in that thread.

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.

zzo38computer2• 2 years ago

and it is a universal encoding of all human writing

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.

rvba• 2 years ago

This article is so poor.

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?

Scene_Cast2• 2 years ago

Some interesting niche bits: there was an attempt at Linear Hangul; there is an Indonesian language (Cia-Cia) that has nothing to do with Korean that uses Hangul; the original script had many more letters (such as a triple dot or triangle) than are currently common.

tokinonagare3• 2 years ago

Looks like it was more a political stun than anything really wanted or useful to the population: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jrca/15/0/15_KJ00009911... (when reading the conclusion)

t3rra• 2 years ago

Surely, Japanese article must be trustworthy when it comes to things related to Kotea! lol

yongjik• 2 years ago

As a Korean, I second this assessment. The "Cia-cia" project is widely viewed as a misguided attempt to sell an unusual writing system to a tribe living in a sea of other tribes, all using Latin alphabets. Just imagine how much technical issues these poor people would face, should they actually adopt Hangul, when the entire remainder of Indonesia uses Latin alphabets.

WillAdams• 2 years ago

Yeah, that was related to technological limitations of the time in addition to the politics of North/South.

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)

djaouen• 2 years ago

In my opinion, hangul is the most logical and rational of all the writing systems. Very few surprises when reading something unfamiliar.

int_19h2• 2 years ago

It would be nice if the original design (with dots etc) was preserved, rather than trying to make it look more like Chinese.

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?)

zzo38computer2• 2 years ago

What is the original design with dots etc?

eleveriven2• 2 years ago

Hangul’s logic and rationality are what make it stand out among writing systems

eleveriven2• 2 years ago

As someone who’s been trying to learn Korean, I have to admit that while Hangul is undeniably impressive in its design, I still found it challenging to fully grasp at first. Learning to recognize the shapes and sounds of the letters was relatively straightforward but putting it all together into readable syllables and understanding pronunciation rules took me longer than I expected.

History of Hangul

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