Day 1 of Ashley Learns Korean - Hangul is SO easy... right?

8/22/2017

Hi there! Or.. anyeong haseyo? Maybe I'll actually be able to write that in Hangul from memory by the next update!

I'm Ashley Ghastley,

...or that's what you can call me at least. It's the internet, I could be anyone! I doubt you believe that's my 'real' name. But anyway...

I'm an American, but I've had a desire for a long time now to learn the Korean language. And I want to log my progress and discuss it on Steemit!

Why Korean?

Well, besides learning a new language being a great way to become a smarter, better person overall, I find the hangul writing system to be very smartly made, compared to languages like Japanese and Chinese with their enormous character-based writing systems that require things like rote memorization of hundreds of individual words, stroke orders, etc...

As well, I find lots of things interesting about Korean culture - typical as they might be - I do enjoy K-Pop and K Hip-Hop from time to time, Korean food is delicious (Bulgogi anyone?), and I find the sound of the language to be very nice on the ears.

Why start posting my experience learning Korean on Steemit?

I'm sure many of you are driven by the same things I am - Steemit is an awesome new emerging platform with a small community meaning it's much more likely you have a chance to 'stand out in the crowd' - so posting anything is more fun than most other platforms, but also by posting my experience on the thriving community of Steemit, there are a bunch of other benefits:

1. Smaller, more engaged community means more commenters to help me along, shame me for not improving as much as I should (😊), and hopefully help me practice my Korean!
2. A fairly large community of Korean speakers due to their large influence on the Crypto community! This is a majorly huge help! Hopefully lots of Korean speakers will start commenting once I have a basic grasp and they can help me fix my mistakes! Plus, there are lots of articles in Korean that I can read once I improve my skills!
3. ...To make money! 😊As a newbie to Steemit, I'm still not quite a believer that this site can really make me money, nor do I understand all of its' rules and quirks yet. Though, let's be honest, that's why so many people are drawn to Steemit, don't you think? I'll be happy if I get to learn Korean, regardless of money being involved, but it'd be a nice incentive! I'm not ashamed to admit it...

Prior Experience & Plan

This is early days for me with Korean, but here's what I know so far, so we're all on the same page! When I got the idea for this series, before I even started writing this article, I sat down and wrote out everything that I was fairly confident about. So this is everything I know in Korean, from memory. Are you ready?!

(I looked it up, and what I wrote down for 'u' is actually 'o'!)
Yep.. that's it. I'm not even sure all of those basic consonants at the top are correct! And guess what? I spent a whole evening recently taking memory tests on the Hangul characters and going over them again and again. I guess it didn't stick...

Browsing Wikipedia, I found a funny quote regarding Hangul:

"A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days."

(Jeong In-ji)

I don't consider myself a genius, but I guess one morning (or evening in my case...) isn't enough for me.

Hopefully I'll have a good grasp of Hangul by the time ten days are up! Otherwise Mr. In-ji would consider me worse than a 'stupid man'... but don't worry! If you're like me and you're an absolute beginner to the Korean language, and to Hangul, you might not know: it's considered by many to be the easiest character-based languages, as I discussed briefly earlier. Here's why - as far as I know:

Hangul is comprised of individual blocks, and syllables are formed by combining these blocks together to make new syllables!

For example, you can combine ㅎ (H) andㅏ (A) together to make 하 - Ha!
It's as simple as that! Since it's that simple (besides a couple other rules and quirks or exceptions), it's a very easy language to learn to write.

So, I hope to master Hangul before long, and then I can start working on grammar and vocabulary. With a language like Japanese, it might take YEARS before you have a decent grasp on the written language, whereas with Hangul & Korean I've heard people claim they are able to read an entire Korean Wikipedia page in one day of learning.

Of course... actually understanding what any of the syllables mean... that's another story! But that's the long haul.

So begins my journey attempting to learn Korean... starting with Hangul, and then who knows where?

Ultimately, my goal is to hopefully provide interested learners with an idea of how long this process might take someone to do, by watching my progress. Hopefully I can help other learners on difficult subjects, amuse some fluent Korean speakers with my terrible abilities, and eventually get to a fluent level myself! ... Yeah, right. Hey, I can try, at least!

Resources

In order to start learning, I'm going to start doing a lot of googling, but if you're interested in learning Korean as well, here's what I've found so far. To get started, I've found the following, and in the future will let you all know how they worked out:

iPhone Apps

TTMIK

Talk to me in Korean App - I am familiar with Talk to me in Korean, it's a great company attempting to teach people Korean through Youtube videos, podcasts and other products. Excited to see what the app can offer!

Hangul App

Seems to be a simple app teaching Hangul. Not much else to say. Seems to be a free version of a paid app.

Drops

This one looks interesting! Very slick looking app - meant for 5-minute-chunks of learning (in their own words: "people tend to be lazy - Drops takes advantage of this!) and swiping instead of typing on an annoying keyboard. Very promising!

PopPopping Korean - Pronunciation & PopPopping Korean - Conversation

Probably for later, but might be worth checking out! Cool, although childish looking apps about learning Pronunciation and Conversation in Korean.

Websites

At the moment I've only been using this site, which is a cute little flash app where you can practice your memory of Hangul characters. I will probably move on from this once I figure out which iPhone apps are the best, but it's useful for drilling the characters into my memory. The problem is remembering them on my own.. as you could see, I could only remember around 4! Hope that improves soon!!

Closing

Thanks for reading! At the moment I'm still finding my footing - I'm not sure if this post is more for myself, for others learning the language as well, for Korean people to help me learn, or just to help force myself to take this more seriously.. I might have been a little meandering, I'm kind of tired, but I think no matter what, this is an awesome start to my quest to learn Korean! I'll try to make the future posts a little shorter, and try to get a bit clearer of a purpose.. I think mostly I wanted to show that, at the start here, I have ABSOLUTELY no IDEA what I'm doing yet, so hopefully when I start learning it'll be more impressive because of how bad I was when I started! If anything, I hope I made you laugh, smile, or at least root for me! I'm gonna do this!

Annyeong!