http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/CU/ … _1_1_1.jsp

I went through a Korean-learning phase about a year and a half ago (I quit when I got pregnant), and used this Korea tourism site.  It's got a wealth of material to go through.  I made it through the alphabet with ease (it's only 28 or so letters with their own assigned sounds, just like English! Super easy!)  It's WAY less tedious than Japanese, and it's not tonal like Chinese and Vietnamese, so honestly, it should be as easy as any latin-based language to learn.  The site has I think 30 or so lessons, with several chapters each and a ton of vocabulary plus audio.  I made it through the first several chapters, making my own flaschards for the vocab, and recording with my .mp3 player the audio off the computer. (you might not need to go that far, since you may have more computer time than I)

And that was before I knew about the SRS system, and Anki.

It worked well enough that I can read a Korean dictionary, and look up words in it.  (I bought the entire manhwa set of Full House in Korean to plug through)  It worked well enough that when I drive through Korea Town on Garden Grove Blvd, I can read outloud all the Korean signs (though I didn't know what they all meant).

I plan on returning to learning Korean, once I get literate and fluent enough with my Japanese. (and maybe after a brief month or two learning Vietnamese, so I can speak to my neighbors in their own language!)

And if you've done your time with Korean dramas, you're already familiar with what the language sounds like.  Let us know if you find any other resources. I'd like to know, too!

Last edited by Thunk (2009 April 20, 8:18 pm)

Hangul is really easy and will be brute-forced into your head no matter what you do since reading Korean is a constant over-exposure to hangul. Like mattyjaddy, I learned hangul extremely quickly, just an afternoon. Then I got good at it by simply reading sentences in Hangul (without understanding it).

Writing hangul is a lot harder and will take a different form of training but you should start with learning to read it regardless.

yukamina wrote:

Tobberoth wrote:

Writing hangul is a lot harder and will take a different form of training but you should start with learning to read it regardless.

What's hard about writing hangul?


Anyway, when I was learning hangul, I found it easier when the letters were introduced a couple at a time to spell syllables, rather than trying to memorize a list of them all.
But after you learn them, just read and write a lot, and you'll have them down easily.

Well, I'm talking about the act of spelling korean, not writing hangul per se. The actual writing of the characters is really simple.

When you hear a Japanese word, you can easily write it in kana without fail. The same isn't true for hangul where a lot of the characters are silent, and many of them change sound depending on where they are in a word. They also have many more phonemes than we do, making it even harder. I personally found the hangul diphthongs much harder to get write than Japanese diphthongs.

Last edited by Tobberoth (2009 April 21, 11:52 am)

Spelling in korean is god damn hard.

Hahaha, there's no language as hard to spell as English, my friends.

I just can't deal with seeing so many circles in an east asian language( Yeah I know about the circle that changes "H" to "p" and the full stop thingy just in case anybodies feeling pedantic today;) "

Thanks so much!

<3

Definitely best site to learn Korean: http://language.snu.ac.kr/english/pages/SD00023_00.jsp

Machine_Gun_Cat wrote:

I just can't deal with seeing so many circles in an east asian language( Yeah I know about the circle that changes "H" to "p" and the full stop thingy just in case anybodies feeling pedantic today;) "

You forgot 〇（ゼロ、れい）

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2009 September 19, 7:09 am)

Since my wife was reclaiming the electronic dictionary she borrowed me after I came to Japan (actually she would have liked a new one), I thought this was a perfect occasion to purchase one that added Korean to the mix. Given the Korean drama boom a few years ago, I thought that there would be plenty of models to choose from. Wrong. There's a good choice of Chinese-Japanese-English models, but for Korean beyond basic travel sentences, the store clerk (K's Denki if you want to know) had to consult every brochure of every maker before finding one and only one that fit the description: a Casio EX-word XD-SF7600, part of a series of trilingual dictionaries offering also Russian, Spanish, etc.

Luckily the next store a few kilometers away had one in store, so the next day we went there for the purchase. Now, Japanese are not known for haggling (they love their point cards, coupons and omake gifts though, which require minimal communication), except, apparently, when it comes to hardware. K's Denki offers no point cards, only lowest prices, so if you can show that another chain offers a better price, you can usually get that price, instead of getting more points as in other stores. But in this case we didn't really know about other stores, and still my wife talked and talked until she got 10% off the price and a case on top. I just stood by and admired the charade.

This beauty has Korean keyboard input, automatically switched to when selecting the Korean-Japanese dictionary, native sound for many words (also for the other languages), digital sound for the rest (Korean only), but not for example sentences, except the aforementioned travel sentences (which also include 7 or so other languages and have both English and Japanese translations), a writing pad with stylus to jot down notes and enter characters (any language) for direct input using OCR, and more. The Korean words have phonetical transcriptions in both (phonetic) roman letters and katakana, and sometimes hanja.

There are three Korean dictionaries from two publishers, one offering both KJ and JK, the other only KJ. So no Korean-Korean I'm afraid. If you want to go Korean-English or vice versa, you always have Japanese as an intermediate step, so it's a huge plus if you're already proficient in Japanese. It may at the same time help you expand your Japanese vocabulary. Surprisingly the Japanese-English dictionary is not linked to any of the top buttons, but only accessible through the menu, unlike the English-Japanese dictionary. For some time I was under the impression that JE would be restricted to the index for the English-Japanese dictionary, which is far from an ideal way of looking for definitions, before I found the JE dict in the menu and moved it to the list of preferred dictionaries. If I only had the index, I would have gone JJ full bore, now at least I have a choice.

One of the first things I tried out, was the flashcard feature. Quite the bummer. Six decks of at most 100 cards, front and back, but the worst is you create cards by scribbling on the writing pad. I don't see the advantage of learning from scribbles on a digital machine with a perfectly capable keyboard. I didn't bother to look at what the flashcard algorithm was like. Probably just shows up every card in random order each time you start a drill.

A far better feature is the word list feature. This allows you to select words from the dictionary and add them to a list (one per dictionary), then when you display the list, you see the words only, in Hangeul and Hanja, 17 at a time; clicking one will bring you to its definition. I'm using that now to familiarize myself with the Hangeul characters and sounds, based on the words for the writing practices in the course I'm now following. Not really ideal for rehearsing stuff (Anki would be better), but good enough for a first dip into the vocabulary, with immediate access to definitions and sounds.

So far I love my new toy. Now back to learning, I mean working.

A devoted RTKer would more likely be interested in learning the hanja. But for Japanese learners, there's an unmistakable advantage in learning though a Japanese site, given the similarities in grammar and vocab. Having these similarities exposed should allow you to learn much more efficiently. Just watch out for the katakana trap... says me who has only scratched the surface of the language. If I find any recommendable JK course sites, I'll post them here.

yukamina wrote:

chamcham wrote:

As RTKers, shouldn't we be learning Hangul by reading books/websites in Japanese?.... :-)

For Korean, sure, but for hangul? Japanese pronunciation is more limited, I wouldn't recommend it unless the descriptions and sound files are really awesome or something.

Even English isn't enough for learning hangul. Again another reason why one should use the International Phonetic Alphabet to learn an alphabet . Or, listen to the sounds and associate the sounds with the character, and not use any form of transliteration at all. That is sure to gaijinise your already gaijinised accent.