Nadya 4 days 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...

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sundarurfriend 4 days ago

> 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.

Ha, one of my main motivations for wanting to learn Korean is how beautiful it sounds to me. Funny how that goes, diametrically different subjetive perceptions.

qingcharles 4 days ago

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.

mabster 3 days ago

I started learning Korean but never really got the far. But, straight after learning Hangul you get into sound mixing (https://www.missellykorean.com/korean-sound-change-rules-pdf...). Trust humans to invent something simple and then make it complicated over time!

Japanese has similar stuff with their u-dropping, but not as complicated as Korean.

soraminazuki 3 days ago

So this is why some words sound nothing like the romanized spelling. This has been confusing me to no end when learning Hangul with Duolingo.

Nadya 3 days ago

It's such a common aspect of languages too that many people don't even realize when they're doing it in their native language!

People get lazy - especially natives who don't get confused because it's how most natives will talk. For example, every word ending in "ing" in your comment could drop the "g" sound when spoken. Plenty of English speakers do that when speakin' and not many people would think anythin' of it until a frustrated person learnin' English asks why nobody is pronouncin' the endin' "g". Droppin', changin', and blendin' sounds is why learning a language by listenin' to natives speakin' is so important instead of crammin' textbooks all day.

Some might consider this a regional thing/accent and I'd argue that it both is and isn't. To the extent I tried to illustrate it would likely get seen as an accent but the occasional droppin' of it is somethin' I've heard across so many different English accents that I'd argue it isn't only an accent thing.

In the US it's mostly associated with a Southern accent and in England it would be the English Midlands like Brummie or Mancunian.