Why is Korean a Unique Language to Learn?
Korean is an East Asian language spoken by about 80 million people mainly in South Korea, North Korea, and parts of northern China. A number of features make Korean a very unique language to learn.
Linguistically speaking, Korean is an ‘agglutinative language’. This means that Korean nouns, verbs, and descriptive verbs (adjectives) are comprised of two things: a). the word stem (the part that denotes meaning) and b). a postposition that is glued to the word stem serving grammatical functions. While you don’t need to know these technicalities to start learning Korean, being able to tell where a word ends is super helpful (for example, when you want to look it up in a dictionary). The good news is that LingoDream automatically separates Korean word stems and josa (postpositions) with a whitespace, so that you can more easily parse the sentence and look up new words by clicking on them.
Similar to liaison in French, individual words tend to collide in spoken Korean. And they have complicated rules on how to make such collisions. In my experience, trying to memorise these rules (and exceptions thereof!) by rote is proven hopeless. The only remedy is continued exposure through reading and listening. Fortunately, LingoDream automatically gives you pronunciation marks on top of the original Korean text every time you import or post an article. You can also listen to the high-fidelity text-to-speech audio at your own pace while reading the text at the same time.
Although, the pronunciation marks feature is currently experimental. At the time of writing, a notable issue is when ㅅ andㅇ collide, it should result in ㅅ, but somehow it currently outputs ㄷ. For instance, ‘것은’ is pronounce [거슨] not [거든] and ‘것으로’ is pronounce [거스로] not [거드로]. Apart from this minor quirk, the auto-generated pronunciation marks are incredibly helpful and surprisingly accurate. If you are already an advanced learner, you can turn off this feature and take advantage of LingoDream’s multiple reference tools while reading.
While the Korean alphabet is fairly simple, Korean learners must contend with the vast number of homographs that this simplicity has created. According to different sources, approximately 60 to 70 percent of the Korean words are of Chinese origin. These borrowed words were originally written in Chinese characters and their pronunciation was also similar to the Chinese vernacular at the time. Since Chinese is a tonal language and Korean is not, many characters have the same pronunciation in Korean. In the 15th century, Korean King Sejong the Great created a phonetic alphabet called Hangul in order to preserve the Korean language. This alphabet, however, did not come into popular use until 20th century, when it gradually replaced Chinese characters in both North and South Korea.
While the above is an interesting bit of history, it also creates a problem for foreigners who want to learn Korean. Many Korean words are written exactly the same in Hangul while having different origins in Hanja (Chinese characters). That is to say they look the same but mean different things. LingoDream solves this problem in two ways:
- By clicking on any word while you read a Korean text, you can easily access multiple dictionary definitions, images, instant translations, Wikipedia entries, and authentic audio pronunciations, making sure that you truly understand the word in the given context.
- For native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, or anyone who has previously learnt some Chinese characters, LingoDream also shows you a possible set of corresponding Chinese characters, if any, when you click or select a Korean word.
To learn more about LingoDream, check out this post.
In addition to making reading Korean texts much easier and enjoyable, LingoDream also utilises spaced repetition and enables you to review or recall contextual vocabulary flash cards at scientific intervals. Sign up today on LingoDream and become fluent in Korean in no time! Or subscribe to our free newsletter and get more practical language learning tips.
