Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Troglodyte]

Does anyone know of a program or website that can transcribe hangul chracters into their phonetic eqivalent in greco-roman letters?

I'm trying to learn spoken Korean and I find it a lot easier to sound out the words if i see them written in an alphabet that i already know.

[crisdean]

I don't know of any such program, but there's bound to be one somewhere on the net, though greco-roman isn't the right term since greek and latin use different alphabets.

However I would caution you that this might not be a good idea, as you may end up using it as a crutch, and the various romanisations of Korean aren't very good anyways, especially the vowels and dipthongs.

I would recommend just sitting down and learning the hangul jamo ("letters"), it's actually quite simple to learn the basics, though there are a great many pronunication exceptions, but from what I understand most of those exceptions exist merely to soften the sounds and if you say it the harsh way people will still likely understand. So don't worry so much about the exceptions just learn the basic sounds, it is said that Hangul (the written alphabet) can be learnt in a day, and I'd agree that.

And let's face it, if you're going to learn to speak Korean you'll need to learn to read and write eventually anyways, so you might as well do that first.

[kinerry]

[redaxe]

Dude, just learn 한글, it takes like two days. Romanization only makes Korean more confusing because there are like four completely different systems and they are used interchangeably.

[crossmr]

and any readers interpretation of what romanized korean should sound like is highly dependent on where they come from as letter pairings might be pronounced different depending on their first language.

romanization is useful for tourists and international media.. that is about it.

[orosee]

Agree that it is best just to learn Hangeul, you'll get a lot of benefits from that.

Not sure how reliable this is, but Google Translate gave me this from a Korean phrase I copied off our corporate website:

[redaxe]

[orosee]

Well, good to know that Google is not perfect yet!

My life changed from impossible to merely challenging once I knew how to read Korean characters (even without understanding the meaning of the words).

No point in learning the Latin script for 'pharmacy' when one can't recognise it in Hangeul

Not to mention that dictionaries will be pretty useless without the skill.

[cheolsu]

Reading romanized Korean is a nightmare. Reading anything more than certain words is a nightmare. It's much, much better to learn to read Korean. You will go much farther.

Yaereuldeulmyeon, ee munjang ilgeosaeyo:

Hangookmal yeongmun-euro sseomyeon neomu eoryeoweoyo. Geuraeseo, jom hangul bbali baeweosaeyo.

As you try to write sentences, you get lost in the alphabet soup of vowels and combinations that are impossible to decipher for an English speaker, like eoryeoweoyo (어려워요), which I would probably read ee-oh-rye-ee-oh-we-oh-yo instead of aw-ryaw-waw-yo.

[orosee]

[Gaber]

So, I take it your looking to wrestle the language under control...

sry...

[Troglodyte]