They're based on diagrams of the mouth, tongue, and teeth making the sounds of Middle Korean.

There are some complications applying the script to Modern Korean in 2015, but it's still a very good script, and easy to learn, too.

For a learner, I think the more significant problem is successfully getting the sounds of Korean down.

The script is (mostly) easy, but you have to get the right connections between the sounds and script in your head.

For an English speaker, the main challenge is the vowels, I think.

Even though I had Korean friends helping me, I had a lot of trouble with the vowels! :-)

But they're not the same vowels! :-)

English has more vowels than most languages.

Embarrassingly, the only languages I can name the number of vowels in without counting are Japanese and Spanish.

And Old Japanese.

English has 14? Hmm...

→ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

I think it depends on how you count.

Korean has between 8 and 18, I think.

When Hangul was created, it had 9 kinds of vowels, and there was also a vowel length distinction, so 9*2

I think.

koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/…

Search for arae-a

arae-a has disappeared from almost all dialects in Modern Korean

So it went from 9 → 8

But the length distinction isn't entirely gone for all speakers, even today

I don't think learners really need to worry about it though... Well, I'm not very good at Korean.

That would be ㅔ and ㅐ

Obscenicons or grawlixes, I think.

webcache.googleusercontent.com/…

I used the Google cache to view it because I was too lazy to install a PPS viewer on my laptop :-)

I can't see any of the charts, though.

uta.edu/faculty/david/Silva-Jin_ICKL_2008.pps

"Many sources persist in claiming that 애 ay and 에 ey are distinct: “False Positive Transfer”"

They're talking about learners of Korean learning them as separate sounds.

That reminds me of people learning Japanese as a second language who are taught づ and ず are distinct sounds.

Who are then surprised when きずく 'build' and きづく 'become aware' are pronounced the same way

Ah! You're very perceptive!

By the way, everyone, remember we've got a Korean Language proposal on Area 51 in the commit phase! :-)

It hasn't been in commit too long.

The rats are dancing in a line!

Conga rats…

@DamkerngT. Well, I'm not very good at this language stuff. I try to make up for it by putting in lots of effort :-)

You were a baby fox!

Who knew foxes grew up into robots?

Like French -e.

They look like red foxes to me.

Well, if you put e in French, it probably wouldn't say "female name suffix" :-)

By the way, Vulpes vulpes, the red fox, is known as キタキツネ (Kita-kitsune 'Northern Fox') in Japanese

(And both the /i/s are devoiced, so it might sound like k'ta k'tsu ne to a foreign ear)

By the way, just to be 100% clear

I was commenting on your use of kit rather than kid :-)

Sometimes people have trouble believing the /kizuku/ thing.

That きづく and きずく are homophones.

I think orthography has a really strong effect on how we conceptualize our pronunciation.

Look what happens if I look up きづく in the NHK pronunciation dictionary:

They both share the same audio file :-)

Japanese has no articles.

tsu is a consonant followed by a vowel.

On its own it has no meaning.

It's like asking what "rawl" means in "grawlix"

Japanese, unlike Chinese, is highly polysyllabic

It has verbs like 承る uketamawaru

You can find tsu in verbs like 奉る tatematsuru

I cheated and deliberately chose longer verbs to make my point :-)

Well.

Japanese is agglutinative.

So you can make an arbitrarily long verb form if you want.

Me either.

It's just how Japanese works. Lots of stuff that would be expressed with separate words in other languages is expressed by making the verb longer in Japanese.

But then.

Turkish is the prototypical agglutinative language.

So you should be familiar with the idea.

In fact, last century there were linguists who tried to prove that Japanese and Turkish were related.

Due to grammatical similarities.

But mainstream linguists have discredited the idea.

Korean is also often considered an agglutinative language.

Korean and Japanese are very similar languages.

Although the sounds of Japanese are simpler :-)

One professor told me that if you want to learn both languages, the best order is Korean then Japanese.

I never really understood why.

Korean is definitely easier than Japanese in terms of orthography.

The language itself? I don't think it's really easier, but I haven't spent nearly as much time on Korean as Japanese, so I can't really compare.

My mother has spent the last ten years on Korean.

Wow! I've never heard that portmanteau before.

No, there isn't much uptake for Chinese or Indian languages.

I think Japanese is popular lately because of anime.

Although I think that most people who learn Japanese for anime give up fairly quickly...

I could be wrong.

I don't think Korean is a very popular language to learn at the moment, but I suppose that could change, too.

K-pop culture has taken the world by storm :-)

Everyone knows Gangnam Style! :-)

Wow, it's up to 2.3 billion views on YouTube.

Possibly that.

Yep: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_viewed_YouTube_videos

Bieber's got nothin' on Psy.

> In 2012, Yoo Jae-suk and fellow host of Infinite Challenge, Noh Hong-chul, appeared in the music video for Psy's hit single "Gangnam Style.".[13] In the video, he was reprising the retro disco dancing character he created for the mock-band "Drooping Snail" in Infinite Challenge's West Coast Highway Music Festival special where Psy also appeared.

"Drooping Snail"!

Haha, I see him!

Today, I encountered amn't again (said by an Irish English speaker)