Well, Korean the language is, like most other natural languages, horrible. Hangul is quite neat though.

Why is Korean horrible?

In general natural languages are horrible but nevertheless working messes. They always change and each language is subtly different from each others, if not massively different.

For example: Korean verb conjugations are massive [1] mainly because conjugations themselves are morphemes (or semi-words, if you don't know what it is) and not mutations or transformations thus the set of conjugations is essentially open. Native Korean speakers can probably easily list hundreds of different conjugations with different meanings.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXakcsoUkAEMPaj.jpg for example.

My seat-of-the-pants take (which I could qualify linguistically, but I think it's fine to posit these concepts colloquially in this context) on this: Most successful human languages provide a similar complexity space within which to express oneself richly.

You need to be able to communicate mood, underrun expectations, frame or defy relationships ... in English, much of this is done by choice of words (especially adjectives and verbs) and word arrangement. In Korean, instead, while there's a giant repertoire of nouns, sentiment and relationships are more often injected via choice of grammar form and word choice is rather more straight-forward.

For example, Westerners make much of Korean's various speech levels ("politeness") which need to be used correctly depending on age or standing of addressor and addressee, and mostly (but not solely) take the shape of different verb endings. But of course English has a complex register system as well - but it's done via word choice and arrangement instead. It's the difference between "I'm sorry, I'm not able to help" and "F*ck off". In Korean, you can conceivably scale this difference by leaving off a word ending aimed at the wrong person combined with body language.

It's this difference - human interaction and the nature of eloquence remain the same in their essence, but the tools of expression have different mechanics - that's fascinating.

(Also, greetings from #rust!)

Yes, Korean has very small number of irregular verbs and grammatical genders (to name a few) in turn. Therefore they are differently horrible :-)

How does it compare to Spanish? We don't have few conjugations either.

"To be": http://www.conjugacion.es/del/verbo/haber.php

In many languages conjugations are defined by the fixed template (the template itself can be large). In Korean, Japanese and other agglutinative languages the template is virtually non-existent (Wikipedia seems to give a 7-part template [1] which looks quite absurd for native Koreans---it should be considered a "common" regularizable subset of what people actually say).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_verbs#Finite_verb_endin...

eh.... haber isn't really "to be" at all. "to be" is pretty well covered by estar and ser. The only case for haber to translate to "to be" is existential, and pretty much only conjugated in the third person when used that way. Otherwise it's just an auxiliary verb, where its usage parallels "to have" in english (but not indicating possession, which is tener). It's basically just a glue verb.

Most languages because they are evolved, not designed.

I thought that the Hangul characters were always written in a group of three, but they're actually grouped by syllables. Neat! It's also fascinating how similar sounds are represented by similar characters.

Those blocks also quite often map to morphemes, so the grouping isn't just syllabic but also retains higher-level morphological information. The orthography prefers letter distributions over groups that keep the same morpheme spelled the same way across use in different words. This promotes morpheme re-use, which is great for context learning.

Letter shapes are featural rather than arbitrary, e.g. a consonant might visualize the tongue position used to make its sound. And yep letters graphically build on each other (normal to iotized vowels and normal to aspirated consonants are all formed the same way, respectively, by adding a stroke).

Hangul is a masterstroke of human cultural achievement. Had a lot to do with me emigrating to Korea! I agree with you that there's a lot of geeky audience appeal to it (including even its origin story of a bunch of smart people applying state of the art knowledge of the day to enable others by freely disseminating it).

Yep. A Korean friend taught me the alphabet in high school and without any practice I can still remember it and slowly (slowly!) pronounce Korean writing today — it's nice and straightforward.