Day 2: Korean 한국, the most beautiful language in the World
About 2 years ago, I told my (ex) girlfriend that I wanted to learn an Asian language, my choice was between Chinese and Japanese. She was Korean, and as any normal person could expect, her answer was "why aren't you studying Korean?". The reason behind my options was because Chinese and Japanese can be useful, so I told her "there aren't that many Korean in the World!". Her reply was a direct sucker punch to my guts.
The next day, I went on Wikipedia and discovered that there are actually 83 million Koreans in the World, a considerable number, not many less than 135 million Italians in the World. So, why not, I'd improve our communication and learn more about the culture, big on some of my favorite things Break Dance, Warcraft and Kimchi.
I register in Coursera for the First Step Korean 5 weeks course. In just 3 days I was able to read the Korean, and I'm not a genius!
What I found fascinating about Korean language is that consonants are a visual representation of the vocal organs and the sound they make:
ㄱ (ki-yǒk) is the sound of the tongue staying in the back ceiling of the mouth
ㄴ (ni-ǔn) is the sound of the tongue touching the gum near the teeth
ㅁ (mi-ǔm) is the sound of the lips
ㅅ (si-it) is the sound of the tongue on the teeth
ㅇ (i-ǔng) is the sound of the glottides
The basic vowels are just 3:
The Korean alphabet has 27 characters, 10 vowels, and 14 consonants, the way they get combined together can create new characters and sounds. Once you get a grasp of the basic one, the combined versions are very intuitive:
This baby song will help you learn and remember the alphabet:
Now that we got the complete alphabet, you can start reading words. Words are a combination of consonants and vowels, in a different order, e.g.:
Korean is an incredibly beautiful language, easy to study and really fun to read, I'd recommend anyone who wants to learn something new to give it a shot, and of course go visit Korea Town and order some bulgogi or bibimbap.
If you read until here, you're a nerd, and chances that you're a developer, you may be curious to know that there's also an exotic coding language based on Korean, which I don't recommend anyone to study unless you're one of those developers who like to waste their time studying shit like brain fuck just for fun. Go instead read a book or go do a puzzle like any other normal person in this planet!!!
Ref contents from:
https://mannamkorean.wordpress.com/tag/king-sejong/
https://www.howtostudykorean.com/unit0/unit0lesson1/
https://www.coursera.org/learn/learn-korean
This post is part of the Writer challenge: 30 articles in 30 days.
Federico Ulfo
Creative Software engineer
https://twitter.com/feulf
https://linkedin.com/in/federicoulfo
Beautiful post
Aye the korean alphabet is pretty awesome indeed, I thought about skipping to practice writing it by hand, but I am so glad i did not. It is actually easier to write those letters than to write roman letters.
I hit a little bit of a brick wall when I tried to start creating own sentences. Asian languages are kind of weird when it comes to syntax.
My korean keyboard stickers arrived a few days ago, so I will get back to more studies soon ;)
Yeah, is very fun to write too! I found more difficult to learn how to speak it rather than read and write it. Then again, I'm a software engineer and I'm always studying new languages, and so far Korean I can say is the easiest to learn.
Yeah, there are also a ton of rules for the pronunciation. I get some of the syntax because I am a huge Otaku and I know concepts like "saying a sentence before eating a meal" :D.
I am also interested in Japanese and Chinese, but I thought Korean would be a good first step. I am also playing League of Legends a ton and Korea as a country is stronger than the whole EU and NA region in the competitive scene.
Excellent post! I had no idea about the characters and how they relate to parts of our body that make the sounds. Really interesting. Also makes me wonder how much language shapes our thinking which shapes our actions.
Many Italian words are onomatopeic, for example terremoto (hearthquake), liscio (smooth), fruscìo (swish) ... In Chinese, the Kanji represent the meaning with images:
it's so cool how languages are somehow self descriptive, it'd be interesting to train a natural language AI, teaching "her" about the evolution of all languages and how words and meaning changed over time, and then fast forward to 200 years from now and see if a new Esperanto like language will become the language spoken by everyone.
Another interesting fact, dialects are disappearing, because used in smaller and more ignorant groups (small town inside the land in Italy, Greece and other Country for example), but recently in Sicily we started to reintroduce the regional dialect back in school, because we started to realize that is part of our culture and identity, as there are world that are crafted for the every day life specific to us, there are word that can't be translated directly, e.g. tumpulata is a specific type of face slap that grandma give to the kids (luckily this word is used mostly in funny contexts).