[HN Gopher] History of Hangul
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History of Hangul
Author : teleforce
Score : 70 points
Date : 2024-11-24 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zkorean.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (zkorean.com)
| rickcarlino wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Nadya wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| I think LingoDeer is generally considerrd a very good app to
| learn CJK. You can start with no prerequisites at all.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| 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.
| joshdavham wrote:
| > 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!)
| Nadya wrote:
| 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.
| sfblah wrote:
| My thought on this is LLMs will replace all this stuff
| within the next 5 years. Skilled conversation partners work
| better than these apps do anyway.
| joshdavham wrote:
| > a worse version of Anki but for the web
|
| This is actually a remarkably common failure pattern for a
| lot of language learning apps. Devs see Anki and think "I'm
| gonna do it better! I'm gonna build Anki, but for a
| specific language and make it a web app." ... I've lost
| count how many of these I've seen over the years!
|
| > It seems like the ETA before enshittification begins is
| about 2~3 years
|
| It's funny, I actually learned the term "enshittification"
| specifically from friends of mine who were Memrise users.
| It's honestly a textbook example of the phenomena.
|
| Negativity aside though, I'm actually pretty optimistic
| about this space despite all that I've seen so far. I think
| that there's genuinely room to build great language
| learning software that people will really benefit from. I'm
| just really pessimistic about most of the people working in
| the space. Without trying to exagerrate, I'd estimate that
| probably less than 10% of people working in the language
| learning industry are actual language learners (at best,
| they might've learned English as a kid). When you're not
| actively, seriously learning a language, you become numb to
| the problems of people who actually care about becoming
| fluent and just end up building tinder-esque games to
| addict people with.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| 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.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's the gist of it. Never in history there was so much
| content in foreign languages and education material
| available that easily and for free, including not only
| writing but audio too (songs, movies). The thing is one has
| to go through it, and it's taking effort over a long time
| to get good, which is why most quit.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| 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.
| thinkingofthing wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| http://letslearnhangul.com/
| iluvcommunism wrote:
| gamsahabnida!
| kijin wrote:
| 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. :)
| senkora wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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
| corimaith wrote:
| 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.
| senkora wrote:
| 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
| kijin wrote:
| 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 coseong, jungseong and jongseong using simple
| arithmetic, just like you can figure out Latin alphabets from
| their ASCII codes.
| hyeonwho4 wrote:
| coseong = initial sound (consonant) jungseong = middle sound
| (vowel) jongseong = 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.
| lgessler wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A paper on Korean where the main acronym is BTS has got to be
| intentional, right?
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| rvba wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Surely, Japanese article must be trustworthy when it comes to
| things related to Kotea! lol
| tokinonagare wrote:
| I expected that kind of remarks. Contrary to Western and
| Korean beliefs, Japanese researchers aren't obsessed with
| shitting on South Korea 24/7. There's a lot of individuals
| genuinely interested other languages and cultures, studying
| things like the Korean speakers in China's Yanbei province.
| In the article I linked, there are more references to
| research articles on the topic written by Japanese than
| what exists in English.
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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)
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(page generated 2024-11-24 23:00 UTC)