안녕하세요!

I've recently started studying Korean.  Why?  Because I'm a glutton for punishment, it seems.  Well, there are other reasons, but I'll save that for another post.

For now, I'd like to share a few insights for anyone else who may be at the initial stages of teaching themselves Korean.  I've only been at it for a few weeks, but I've already discovered a number of things that would have saved me some time if I'd known from the beginning.

First of all, I've found that it's harder to find good resources on the Korean language compared to some other languages. I've been studying Japanese for a year, and there is a plethora of online resources that have proven to be very valuable.  I've found fewer such resources for the Korean language, and most of what I have found isn't of the same quality.  I suspect that this will change over time, as it seems that interest in Korean culture is increasing.  That's not to say good learning resources don't exist: they most certainly do.  But, compared to Japanese, which has enjoyed a greater volume of cultural exports (e.g., anime) for a longer period of time, it seems there has been less demand for, and therefore fewer, high quality learning resources.

Secondly, before starting to learn Korean I had read from a number of source about how "easy" it is to learn the Korean alphabet, Hangul.  Many touted how it could be learned in only a few hours.  This, for all practical purposes, is false.  While one could easily learn to recognize the symbols that comprise the alphabet (which I'd estimate one could learn in as little as 20 minutes), that does you little to no good if one has neither the Korean vocabulary to understand their meaning nor the understanding of pronunciation rules to be able to read them aloud, neither of which can be learned in 2 hours.  I think many simply learn the most basic, heavily accented pronunciation of the letters and think they can read Korean.  This ignores two very important facts:

1. Most Korean sounds have no direct corollaries in English.  Some Korean sounds have English sounds that are similar, while others are quite different from anything that occurs in English.  It takes significant practice to learn to pronounce these sounds correctly, or to even distinguish the differences between sounds in some cases.
2. More importantly, while Korean pronunciation is fairly regular (unlike English), Hangul does not represent how words are pronounced so much as it represents the underlying structure of the word and any particles or suffixes that have been added onto it.  In order to know how to pronounce something written in Hangul, one has to know the various rules for the phonetic transformations that occur between the written and spoken language, which in many cases can result in a quite different pronunciation than what one would come up with without applying those rules.

Coming to grips with pronunciation has, so far, been the greatest hurdle for me to learning Korean.  One resource that has proven very useful for me is the book The Sounds of Korean: A Pronunciation Guide¹.

1. There is another book titled The Sounds of Korean just released this month that intended for the same audience as the first book.  It's by a different set of authors, so I don't know if it's intended as an update to the original or not.  I've not read it and there's no reviews on Amazon, yet, so I can't comment on it.