초성 = initial sound (consonant) 중성 = middle sound (vowel) 종성 = final sound (consonant)

My understanding is that there are two possible unicode encodings of Korean, one of which (MacOS) is sound by sound instead of syllable by syllable (Windows). This is why Korean UTF-8 filenames from MacOS appear broken on modern Windows machines.

> and it is a universal encoding of all human writing

It isn't (and never can be).

> Could you replace it with something better designed? No. No, you cannot. You can in principle design something better,

Something that some people fail to consider, is that one character set is not suitable for all purposes. Unicode is not very good for most purposes though. I think Extended TRON Code has many advantages, although trying to use Extended TRON Code (or some other alternative) for everything would be almost as bad as using Unicode for everything, but in different ways.

> Also, if your game plan for Unicode-D includes removing the most beloved and consistently demanded feature, emoji

I think that colourful emoji should not belong in the character set for text. I also do not want colourful emoji on my computer.

A paper on Korean where the main acronym is BTS has got to be intentional, right?

As a Korean, I second this assessment. The "Cia-cia" project is widely viewed as a misguided attempt to sell an unusual writing system to a tribe living in a sea of other tribes, all using Latin alphabets. Just imagine how much technical issues these poor people would face, should they actually adopt Hangul, when the entire remainder of Indonesia uses Latin alphabets.

Surely, Japanese article must be trustworthy when it comes to things related to Kotea! lol

> Unfortunately I can't help much with learning grammar as I never dove into actually learning Korean due to a dislike of how it sounds.

Ha, one of my main motivations for wanting to learn Korean is how beautiful it sounds to me. Funny how that goes, diametrically different subjetive perceptions.

It's amazing that something that can look so alien to Western eyes is actually pretty straightforward once you try to learn it. I did the same and learned Hangul so I can at least sound things out and do some basic Internet searches etc.

You can do exactly the same with other scripts, e.g. Japanese hirigana and katakana, which are fairly easy to learn, and also Arabic, which looks difficult, but is definitely learnable in an hour.

What is sad, is that there are already whole generations who think one must learn with an app, and are completely unaware of self-teaching textbooks from traditional publishers like Routledge, Assimil, Teach Yourself, etc. These books don’t work for everyone because learning styles are different, but they do work well for some segment of learners, yet with the decline of the physical bookshop, many young people may have never seen them.

(Hardcore linguaphiles are aware of these books, and have been one of the major demographics in the ebook filesharing scene that led to LibGen and Anna’s Archive. But I’m talking about the ordinary people you constantly see on e.g. Reddit who are just moving to another country, have to learn the language, and assume that one uses an app for that.)

Every now and again a site exists that has a massive community, tons of resources, ways to speak with other learners, ways to meet language exchange partners, and are greatly successful. Then all of that gets gutted for what is essentially a worse version of Anki but for the web when the company runs out of funding and has to start turning a profit somehow. This burns the community and the people providing most of the value move elsewhere.

It's happened to italki (now iKnow), Memrise, DuoLingo, and a few sites that were so short-lived I no longer remember what they were called.

My takeaway is that language learning apps are a lot like dating apps. They profit less if people actually learn a language and so can't be too good at their job because they'll bleed users faster than they can gain them - similar to dating apps. It needs to work just well enough that users are tricked into believing it is working but not so well that it actually works for most people.

It seems like the ETA before enshittification begins is about 2~3 years. If you're an early enough adopter you might actually benefit from it but you have to be willing to jump ship and not fall for the engagement/gamification tactics that keep you sticking around after it has stopped providing any value.

I spent way too long 'watering my garden' on Memrise before I looked around and noticed all of the once useful community-providing mnemonics were gone, you couldn't correct bad definitions anymore, it was difficult to actually speak to anyone else in the community (unless you could find them on the forums), and eventually I stopped using it altogether. The community I had signed up for and was a huge part of Memrise's success no longer existed.

I've been successful in learning a foreign language using an app that basically consisted of reading increasingly complex stories.

I don't want to recommend the specific app I used, because it's the only one I tried, and I don't know how well it compares to other, similar apps. But there are a bunch of story-based language learning apps on App Stores. My suspicion is that most of them work relatively well, particularly compared to more typical modern language learning apps like Duolingo.

Unlike gamified apps like Duolingo, you do need to actually have the motivation to regularly use them, though. They're not going to entice you with funny animations and points and leaderboards and notifications and all of those things.

Out of these 4 basic components reading, listening, writing and speaking, it's speaking that is by far the hardest. But there's no computer that can accurately detect nuances in pronunciation and tone much like a native teacher can. This also applies to vacabulary choices and grammar.

감사합니다!

What is the original design with dots etc?

Admittedly most of my impressions are from watching K-dramas but I get the impression that the monarch is somewhat superfluous in bureaucracy-heavy systems like in Joseon and China — and that the government was generally happiest when the kings did nothing. All they have is free time and education.

Plus you should look at Hangul as a political action. Educating the commoners creates a bourgeoisie class that can be the king’s allies against the noble and bureaucratic classes. People who can read laws and write complaints are less subject to the whims of corrupt local officials.

There are ... speculations that King Sejong was not fully independent in the creation of Hangeul. He may have delegated parts of the task to courtly scholars. (But all the evidence either way has been lost to history, and so speculation it remains.) There are a few "historical" dramas which make this their premise.

IMO Tolkien's Tengwar is the closest to Hangul. The shapes of the consonants represent the place and manner of articulation, such that similar sounds look similar on paper. Vowels are written as diacritics above the consonants, with the result that each complete letter represents a syllable.

There are other syllabaries, both naturally occurring and deliberately created, but most of them don't show subpatterns that represent the sounds that make up each syllable. Cherokee looks a lot like the Japanese kana. Which is not surprising, because both are syllabaries designed to overcome the difficulty of a fully ideographic writing system (kanji in the case of Japanese).