kangmi: learning korean

Festival of Learning Korean #1

Welcome to the first Festival of Learning Korean. I’ll be your guide for this tour of Korean language learning links.

New Korean language learning blogs

Two new blogs have joined the learning Korean circuit. Let’s Learn and Practice Korean is written by Hye-Young. While it’s questionable that learners need yet another site on which to learn how to read hanguel, her site tipped me off to The National Association of the Korean Language’s 바른소리 (not Firefox friendly, and full of ActiveX badness). Except for the IE part, it’s a step above the others, with videos of Korean speakers so that you can see as well as hear the sounds of the alphabet.

Hye-Young’s also recorded some content on YouTube. She’s just getting started, and I’m looking forward to what she’ll offer next.

It’s not just Korea that’s sparkling these days. Korean is, too, at Sparkling Korean. Geeone’s got six episodes up already, the last two on drinking in Korea, which means he’s gotten further than the usual beginner fare. The English accent gives his recordings a different (at least for me) flavor.

Here’s hoping that both Hye-Young and Geeone can keep up the pace.

On the technical front

This is a bit old, but I’m indebted to Daehee for tipping me off to Wonseok Chae’s Javascript program that converts English characters to Korean. If you’re stuck somewhere without a way to type Korean, this is a good alternative (as long as you cam remember the keyboard layout).

Antti highlighted links to fonts released by Hankyoreh and Chosun Ilbo.

Lifehacker recently featured ProVoc, a Mac-only vocabulary learning program. ProVoc supports Korean, and there are user-contributed downloads available (where I was pleasantly surprised to see the name of an old Korea friend).

You, the student

Learning Korean has been called “the long journey. Equinox traveled from Singapore recently spent three weeks in Korea at Kyunghee University’s spring intensive Korean language program. Not as far as I would have to travel, but nothing to sneeze at.

Amanda’s posted quite a bit about her Korean language learning. She hasn’t let the recent loss of her job or her apartment hold her back, either. And she’s not shy about sharing her mistakes:

YJ: I understand every part of this letter. There are not too many mistakes.

Me: Good.

YJ: But you just called your brother gay.

Presumably he’s not.

I’ve waited until now to read the comments at Suddenly Susan’s Queer as Pork, as I wanted to see if I could guess all the hangulizations on my own (I couldn’t). It’s a reminder that learning Korean sometimes means learning English, in a different way.

And that’s it for this first edition of the Festival of Learning Korean. I’d be thrilled if one of my readers would like to host next month’s edition. if you’re interested. You don’t have to be a Korean language learning blogger, but you should have an interest in the Korean language.

Posted by kangmi on April 30, 2007 at 11:07 PM