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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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!)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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
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
A paper on Korean where the main acronym is BTS has got to be intentional, right?
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.
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.
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.
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)
Surely, Japanese article must be trustworthy when it comes to things related to Kotea! lol
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)
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.
http://letslearnhangul.com/
I think LingoDeer is generally considerrd a very good app to learn CJK. You can start with no prerequisites at all.
> 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!)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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. :)
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
> 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
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.