A one-page alphabet reference chart would be enough to remind the reader which letter is which without relying on the romanization crutch.
Normally I don't like to make argumentative internet comments but I really passionately think romanization is a detriment to a learning tool.
As someone that knows and can read Hindi, Gujarat, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and beginner at Hangul and Hiragana, romanization absolutely helps anchor the sound. The actual sound when speaking is going to change anyways as your converse with more people. But at least, romanization helps recall and focus on the actual word that you are learning.
Using romanization is a lot worse than in a language like Japanese. In Japanese the romanization somewhat maps well to Japanese. In Korean, the various romanization methods are horrendous and don't come close to Korean at all.
Not only that-- many grammar forms require understanding the Hangul vowels to understand how to conjugate them. If you're using romanization they don't exist.
Even worse, Korean sound change rules make it hard to read Hangul without a lot of practice. If you're using romanization you're completely doomed.
For folks who are learning Korean, hangul is maybe two days to get the basics and maybe a week or less to be able to get comfortable with it.
For super-casuals who just want a ballpark representation, you might be right, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to design around these super-casual folks — when they decide to get serious about learning Korean, Hangul will come quickly.
Hangul, as a phonetic representation, has about the same difficulty as learning hiragana, which takes about the same amount of time to learn.
Maybe if you are referring to older Korean texts that had Chinese characters in them, then I could understand.
> … It shows up in tools for Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew
Kanji (not a syllabary or alphabet), hanzi (not a syllabary or alphabet), and no vowels respectively.
These languages need some romanization support much more than Hangul, imho.
I don't think you'll be able to find empirical support for the idea that romanization is unhelpful after the first week of someone's taking up Hangul in a serious way; or for the idea that Hangul is as simple as Hiragana.
Many people say things like this -- "two days to get the basics" and "a week or less to be...comfortable" -- but I doubt there is any empirical support for figures like that. I suspect that a review of the literature will show that people are still referring back to the romanization for the first two years of their studies, across a wide array of language families, if their first language uses the Roman alphabet.
Hebrew has vowel marks. They are little used but they are very helpful, as well.
Hangul is definitely one of the most logically organized, consistent and systematic systems of writing in the world -- and it may actually be number one in all those categories.
There is a kind of anti-pattern in tools of this kind where the people building them already know some of the basics and so leave them out. It shows up in tools for Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew... I've studied quite a few languages and so have been the beginner over and over.