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
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