History of Hangul
34 points by teleforce 3 hours ago | 14 comments
  • rickcarlino 2 hours ago |
    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.
  • natdempk 2 hours ago |
    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.
    • Nadya 2 hours ago |
      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...

    • n_plus_1_acc 2 hours ago |
      I think LingoDeer is generally considerrd a very good app to learn CJK. You can start with no prerequisites at all.
    • bryanhogan 2 hours ago |
      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.

    • joshdavham an hour ago |
      > 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!)

      • Nadya an hour ago |
        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.

        • sfblah 16 minutes ago |
          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.
  • kijin 2 hours ago |
    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. :)

    • senkora 2 hours ago |
      > 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

  • senkora 2 hours ago |
    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

    • kijin 2 hours ago |
      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.

    • lgessler 9 minutes ago |
      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
  • rvba an hour ago |
    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?