eodiseo osyeossnayo - Where are you from?
The first "s" in osyeossnayo is pronounced like "sh" and the double as are completely silent.
Meanwhile, Google pronounces the phrase
Oh-dis-Oh Ocean-nayo
Are there any resources with better phonetic spelling for Korean words?
Honestly, reading hangeul is very easy and you could probably learn the letters in a matter of hours. I would recommend that over romaji any day.
Romaji is japanese. It's romaja or romaja pyogi for korean. They use different systems also.
true,
Try 한글 instead.
I haven't learned the alphabet yet. I'll get on that
Hangul was intentionally designed to be easy to learn. And it is indeed very simple. You can learn the basics in a few hours and with a little practice it becomes easy to read and sound out words.
Why is everyone downvoting this to oblivion?
They’re being sincere and have shown willingness to learn.
To me it's the arrogantly ignorant tone of the post.
OP confidently blames “stupid” romanization for a problem that actually comes from misunderstanding what romanization is for.
Romanization wasn't designed to be perfect phonetic guides for English speakers (Hell, some romanization systems weren't even made for English but for other languages!).
Korean sounds don’t map cleanly onto English letters, so expecting “s,” “eo,” or doubled vowels to behave like English is what's "stupid", not the first romanized transliterations of Korean words you find when you google them for the first time.
I get what you're saying. It's ballsy to come to a subreddit dedicated to a language and come in hot like that.
However, I think the downvotes should be applied to the main post. Or, it's better to apply your comment above as a root comment.
Yeah it's strange that the original post is still in the positive. I assume the OP reads their own thread, which is why I commented there.
I have to say though, I have to disagree that someone asking for guides with "better phonetic spelling of Korean words" is engaging sincerely with the language. Like most every comment (and every Korean guide I've ever encountered) is recommending, OP should just learn to read Korean.
Ignorance
Well that's your problem lol
When you do, things like when the "ss" is silent or not will make much more sense than when it's romanized.
Lol
Why not? You can learn to read it in an hour or two.
아이구…바보인데?
그를 모욕할 필요는 없어요.
Ditch the romanizations.
as every halfway decent teacher will tell students
it’s imperative to learn hangul before attempting to learn the korean language. there’s multiple romanization systems currently in use, and even then, lots of koreans don’t follow the two most widely used ones. romanization is practically useless if you’re really interested in learning the language
Worst part is Korean name romanization when in the same name they have both "u" and "oo" for ㅜ or they'll have two "u" but one is ㅜ and the other is ㅓ. Or any other combination of "I just picked what looks cool" romanization. It drives me insane which is why I choose to ignore the romanization of any Korean names.
yeah, i know of two 규빈s who all use different romanizations. usually you can pick up how it’s written in korean if you’re familiar with korean names in general, but it’s not foolproof lol
Take your issues up with the National Academy of the Korean Language who created the revised romanization in 2000 - which was a BIG improvement over the previous McCune-Reischauer model.
Personally, I prefer the look and feel of MR. It just falls apart when you omit the diacritic marks that nobody can be bothered to type.
The system currently used in South Korea, Revised Romanization, was published by the government in the year 2000.
Revised Romanization “works” in that it is a systematic representation of the sounds of Korean that you can read accurately if you already know the system, but it is bad because it contains features that are not intuitive to English speakers (such as representing the vowel ㅓ, which sounds like the O in “hog” or the U in “butts” with the digraph “eo”) and spells out certain sound changes (독립 is spelled “dongnip” as it is pronounced, not “dokrip” as it is spelled in hangul) but preserves the Korean spelling in other situations (셔 is the letters S plus YEO, pronounced like “shaw” not “syaw”).
As others have mentioned, the solution is just to learn the Korean alphabet and the sounds of Korean just as they are, without reference to English or the Latin alphabet. Once you know how to read and pronounce Korean, romanization can’t really hurt you. It’s but it’s also almost useless and there is zero reason to use it as per of you’re studies.
And to be fair knowing the system is necessary for Romanization in other languages as well
Because romanization isn’t there for pronunciation. It’s to put the language into letters that are used in many other languages.
you're very anglocentric in your complaint of "how it really sounds". People with different native languages would transcribe the sounds differently and would think "Ocean" is a SUPER bad approximation. That's why a systemic, consistent romanisation exists.
McCune-Reischauer was used before, but depended heavily on diacritics that were frequently left out. ㅜ and ㅡ, ㅓ and ㅗ, ㄱ and ㅋ would frequently be merged by leaving out the diacritics, effectively making it useless, even though technically ŭ is "more intuitive" than eu. It's only useful if people consistently write ŭ and not u, and considering that the semicircle isn't a diacritic you can easily get on a keyboard, and Revised Romanisation doesn't use a single diacritic, I'd say RR is doing great in its usability
The romanized version of any language will have errors.
Even English has these inconsistencies.
“The” isn’t pronounced Tuh-Huh-Eh, because we know “TH” has its own pronunciation and that “E” has a variable pronunciation depending on its placement in a word.
The “SS” letter (ㅆ) in Korean can either mean a sharp “sssss” noise (싸), a “sshhh” noise when paired with the y/i letters (쌰), or a “d/t/n” noise (였나) when at the end of a syllable where the syllable following it does not start with a vowel sound.
I understand you have not learned Hangeul which explains your confusion/frustration.
I learned Hangeul in about an hour, and it cleared up a lot of my issues with the language.
And it's not errors, just simplifications that work just fine so long as you learn the system
"The" not being pronounced "Tuh-Huh-Eh" is not an inconsistency though, it is simply a digraph. What is an inconsistency is that "TH" can have two different pronunciations
How about MR Romanization? "어디서 오셨나요?" becomes "Ŏdisŏ oshŏnnayo?".
But I think Hangul is the best to learn Korean instead of romanizations of Korean.
It's not as simple as you think. Making a system that accurately represented the real sounds for foreigners would necessarily mean using a lot of context-specific spelling rules. Instead, they opted for a system with as much one-to-one spelling consistency as possible. I think they did about as well as anyone could. It's worth remembering that the main point isn't to help foreigners gain perfect pronunciation, but to make things like addresses readable and writable at all to people who can't read 한글. If you're interested in the Korean language, drop the romanization immediately and start using 한글.
Honestly it's way easier to just learn hangul. Lots of good sources on YouTube. You might like Go Billy Korean or Miss Vicky.
cutting our romanizations and only focusing on hangul was the best thing i ever did. it only took 24 hours for me to learn hangul.
This romanization isn't correct. Definitely learn hangeul, but if you're relying on romanization from google translate, just know that it's gonna look ass. Eodiseo osyeonnayo would probably be correct.
The reason eo and o are different is because they are different vowels. Korean has 21 different vowels, which is kind of difficult to romanize without using combinations of letters.
The Hangul romanization works fine if you just apply Hangul rules on the romanization as well. Like in the syllable "yeoss" it doesn't tell you "ss" is pronounced as "t", but the same applies in Hangul. 였 is still pronounced as 엳 and you can't know that unless you learn that batchim rule. It could have been in Hangul and he still might have asked the same question.
Just learn 한글, my friend. All it takes is a few hours or a few days.
Maybe the French were involved. They love silent letters.
Incidentally, the spelling of "Seoul" actually comes from French transcription a couple centuries ago, with "se" as the first syllable, and "oul" as the second.
I mean, yeah, romanizations are sometimes 'stupid' because that is literally not how Korean is written. It is something that is close enough even though oftentimes it ends up being quite far away from the actual pronunciation. Just have to make do type of situation for people who don't know and don't aspire to know Korean.
Then again for people learning Korean, they should learn hangeul quick for their own sake. Learning Korean through romanized writing is kind of pointless and inefficient.
It is kinda how Korean is written though. Just swapping the Hangul letters with Latin nothing more. And it does represent the actual pronunciation if you simply apply the Korean pronunciation rules on it, you're not supposed to think of it as English letters.
Like in the syllable "yeoss" it doesn't tell you "ss" is pronounced as "t", but the same applies in Hangul. 였 is still pronounced as 엳 and you can't know that unless you learn that batchim rule. It could have been in Hangul and he still might have asked the same question.
RR is the standardised form for dual script street signs, names and documents, but MR was around for a long time and many just made up their own romanization. So you will see this inconsistent romanization everywhere, especially with the hyphens.
When I was studying Taekwondo (or is it Taegwondo, or is it Tae Kwon Do, or is it Taekwon-Do?) the romanized words were different to those I saw when I went to Hapkido or Choi Kwang Do (where unlike TKD they used the Sino numbering system).
The only time you need romanization is when you have to transliterate Korean (or any other Asian language) into a western language. When learning Korean you should focus on the Hangul, even if you use a GonjinCheong keyboard layout.
It's a systematic and reliable way to Romanize Hangeul. You just need to learn a couple rules regard to sound changes. The palatalization of ㅅ in syeo is not spelled out, but ur ㅆ changing to ㄴ is spelled out. 어디서 오셨나요 is actually Eodiseo osyeonnayo using the correct romanization scheme.
I've never seen any "sy-" romanizations in Korean. Are you sure you aren't thinking of Japanese?
“Sya” is standard for 샤 in both MR and Revised. It’s just not how anybody who knows English would write it.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EC%83%B4%ED%8E%98%EC%9D%B8
Almost all languages will read strangely when written in a foreign script. Sounds are routinely inconsistent even when written in native script, even for Korean, a famously literal script, and let's not even get started on English.
Overall, Romanisation for Korean is pretty good, and inconsistencies are relatively few.
It's the same with Japanese and romaji and also Chinese. Thing's don't always translate well. It's better to just stick with the original writing and pronunciation and not trying to transcribe it.
Best thing is to not even waste your time with romanization. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Just learn 한글.
never use romanization. Avoid it like the plague
Learn 한글 and you'll get better. Trying to learn Korean without doing 한글 first is like trying to learn how to drive without knowing how to even start the car
Transliterators loooooove to do a straightforward romanization for "how to pronounce" words in English. It allows them to do a letter-for-letter romanization. Russian suffers from this somewhat, with "shch" for letter Щ (when it is pronounced like a more fricative "sh"), or the strict transliteration of Г as G, even when it is sometimes pronounced as English V.
The Korean romanizations are okay in isolation, where "eo" by itself you would pronounce more like "au"; the problem for me is when the romanizations combine. The name 성 is more pronounced like "Song" but gets transliterated as "Seong". This looks like two syllables in English and totally loses its Korean nature.
Romanization also confuses a major feature from Korean, where consonant strength is more important that consonant voicing. English P vs B, or F vs V, or S vs Z make huge differences in English words (pat vs bat, very vs fairy, fussy vs fuzzy), whereas this will only mislead you when trying to read Korean. English unvoiced consonants usually have much stronger aspiration to make them distinct, which sounds like the wrong letter in Korean. So when you look at the romanization and try to pronounce the Korean word, it becomes hard to understand.
As others have said, learn Hangeul. AS WELL, you should learn how to distinguish the different consonants in Korean so you don't over-aspirate them. It will require practice to learn how to hear the difference between 빵 vs 방 and how to pronounce them properly.
The romanization does not confuse consonant strengtg though. If you assume P and B, K and G, T and D also means voicing like in English, that's kinda on your fault because each language has their own values for Latin letters. In Korean the P and B simply mean aspirated vs unaspirated just like with ㅍ and ㅂ. You're not supposed to see it from an English perspective
"Transliterators loooooove to do a straightforward romanization for "how to pronounce" words in English."
What I'll never get is, why in English? I get that English is big and considered almost universal now, but it's also the language with possibly the worst spelling rules, or lack thereof, being so inconsistent.
I'm sure I'm the odd one, but I wish they romanised to Latin instead.
There is a whole history on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Korean
Usually it's governments or institutions that do it; think of card catalogs for the Library of Congress, or standardizations for international passports. But I think the main one used today was an attempt to make Korean easier for westerners.
My main challenge for my English-to-Korean journey has been to recognize the syllable blocks themselves as sounds, instead of trying to look at romanized words. I think that's the way natives do it? I know the blocks are phonetically arranged and you can figure out the sounds by reading the individual letters, but I'm sure Koreans see a block and think of the syllable for it. That should be much faster than trying to put pp-a-ng together for 빵.
Revised Romanization tries to do a one-to-one equivalency of hangul characters to latin characters, with certain assimilated sounds also represented. Also the "e" in vowels "eu" and "eo" is not meant to be pronounced, but to act as a silent modifier of the vowel next to it, to avoid using funky diacritic marks like the McCune Reischauer romanization system.
If you are asking in good faith "who came up with the revised romanization," and you would actually like to know, it was the result of five-plus years of development by the National Academy of the Korean Language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Romanization_of_Korean
As others have said, just learn hangul. It was purposefully designed to be easy to learn and to represent the sounds of the Korean language. For as much effort as it takes to learn to accurately read romanization, you may as well just learn hangul.
Romanization is meant to show what Korean letters are used, not how to pronounce the word.
If you want phonetic spelling, the Koreans invented a handy alphabet for that called Hangeul.
Hangul doesn't make alot difference. For example if we look at the syllable 였 yeoss. It is pronounced "yeot" so why is it spelled 였 instead of 엳? That means it also not fully phonetic and no different from the romanization. Because it isn't fully phonetic there is a lot of batchim and consonant assimilation rules that you have to learn
You're right. I wonder why it's so stupid ;)
Because in the past the pronunciations were different. These pronunciations changed but the spelling didn't! For example 최 Choi is written with ㅗ andㅣ despite being pronounced 웨 because in the past it actually was pronounced as Oi. The pronunciation changes are also the cause of batchim and consonant assimilation. Ik ben ook Nederlands btw xd
Learn how to pronounce Korean and this won't be a problem.
Romanisation is fine. People just need to stop expecting it to be some kind of pronunciation guide for English speakers.
You don’t learn Hangeul and depend on Google for accurate pronunciation of romanisation… and suddenly it’s romanisation’s fault for being “stupid”? So many things wrong with this post. SMH.
the yale romanization is even worse, it makes zero sense.
but yeah, if you actually want to learn korean you MUST learn 한글 or else you're just fooling yourself.
It'll be much easier to pronounce if you learn the alphabet first!
yeah i get the frustration, romanization sucks for pronunciation. it was made for standardizing how to write korean in letters, not for helping english speakers say stuff right. thats why eo is like uh and si is shi, reading it english-style always comes out wrong. straight up, no there arent really good phonetic spellings out there cuz korean sounds dont match english letters one-to-one. best move is ditch romanization and learn hangul in an afternoon. its scary at first but it was designed to be super quick, like a few hours tops. once you can read the real script, pronunciation clicks way better.
Well because the romanization is not supposed to be read English style, and it's not supposed to match English letters. Each Latin letter has been given their own Korean value. It's not like this letter makes this sound in English so it also has to me this sound in Korean. How else does the Latin script work for French, Vietnamese, Spanish, German etc. despite these language having all such different sounds? You also don't assume English pronunciations on them
I get why the romanization feels off - its inconsistent and hard to predict. I would try using the revised romanization system or just learn hangeul directly. Its actually pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it and you wont have to deal with weird spelling quirks. Most Koreans use hangeul anyway so its the most practical approach long term.
The romanization is pretty consistent. Just like you have to learn the pronunciation rules for Hangul, these pronunciation rules also apply on the romanization as well.
Uhh-dee-suh oh-shut-nah-yo
You're copping a lot of flack in the replies but it comes down to this: If you want to learn Korean you cannot rely on romanisation and your first step is to learn Hangul. Just as the Roman alphabet is the best writing system to represent the English language, Hangul is the best writing system to represent the Korean language. It only takes a few minutes to understand the basic concepts, a few hours to memorise the letters, and a few days to get comfortable reading simple sentences. Make yourself some flash cards and you'll never have to wonder about pronunciation again.
Romanization is evil
It’s allowed only for learning 한글, any use beyond that is a straight to jail sentence ;)
Learn the Korean alphabet. Romanization, IMO, feels opinionated. One person may do “eo” for ㅓ and someone else may do “uh”, but people may pronounce 너 like Neo when it is more like Nuh.
It reminds me when my non-Korean friends bring up karaoke videos with romanized lyrics and I’m like “WTF is this? Pull it up in Korean so I know I am pronouncing words correctly.”
The romanization works completely fine if you just learn all the pronunciation rules (and almost all of the are the same rules that you have learned with Hangul). You are not supposed to assume English pronunciation for the romanization.
It's not different from karaoke in any other language. If you do karaoke in for example German, Vietnamese etc. but you don't know the pronunciation rules, of course it will sound wrong just like if you sing the Korean romanization without learning the rules, which is what your friends are doing.
Romanization could be useful for if your Hangul reading speed is not fast enough yet which I have with songs with fast raps
There is no standard, it’s just up to whomever types it…