If you want to actually learn Korean, check out this site. [1] An American knowing no Korean moved to Korea and meticulously documented everything he learned, and this website was the result. It's an incredibly thorough study into Korean.

[1] http://www.howtostudykorean.com/

Can confirm this is one of the best text-based sites out for there for learning Korean. On days when I'm really studying, I typically have 4 or 5 tabs open from just this domain alone.

Anything similar for Japanese or Chinese?

Tae Kim's work is probably the equivalent for Japanese [0]. I think his "complete guide" is still a work in progress, but his grammar guide is pretty much the defacto free resource.

[0]: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/

I actually suggest imabi.net over Tae Kim depending on how you want to define "learning the language".

Tae Kim is a great introductory guide to Japanese and is something I often hand to beginners. But for anyone who wants to seriously study the language, imabi.net is on an entirely different level.

[0] http://imabi.net

Yes, Korea (Hangul) really is about this easy to learn. It takes about a week of an hour a day to remember everything well enough to be able to sound out Korean words easily (and it's especially fun when you find English loan words).

Depending where you live, you might not use it very often, but it's a neat skill to pick up.

It also does that weird hack to your brain where you start looking at signs and instead of just seeing a picture of the sign, your brain almost starts involuntarily looking for things to read (almost like in some kind of unkillable background thread). Since it'll be a new writing system, your brain won't do it as quickly, but you'll never be able to look at ㄱ and not immediately have your brain turn that into a 'g/k' sound, but it'll happen kind of slowly compared to your native script and you can "feel" the thread working.

Yes this!

Like many Indians, I was raised bilingual on completely different scripts (Latin alphabet and Malayalam) and learned the Hindi (Sanskrit) script when I was really young too. I learned to read Hangul in the first 2-3 days of wandering the streets of Seoul aimlessly when I stayed there for a month, just trying to read every neon sign, advert and train/bus stop I came across.

The thread works at slightly different paces for each of them because of how much I use each one, really feeling like it's all about cache hits and memory bus limitations. It's pretty interesting to meta-think about.

It's so weird because of how involuntary it is. I notice that on signs in languages I can sound out, my gaze will stick on the sign until I can "read" it, without me wanting it to happen.

The first few days in a new country can be kind of exhausting simply because of this effect.

He did the same with Russian a while back.

http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/97607943779/learn-t...

Fastest decomplexification I ever felt. Before that Korean was like Chinese, and now it's as easy as Korean.

Free PDF for learning Korean: http://www.koreanfromzero.com/

I've heard a lot of good things for the author's other series Japanese From Zero.

This is a great start. But there is more to it, if you wanna learn. Eg. Double final consonants 닭, and all the "Consonant assimilation" stuff.

The Korean Wiki Project has a more indepth look. http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/Learn_hangeul

The Korean script is fantastic, yes, one of the few designed to effectively promote popular literacy. But you're only going to learn to read Korean in 15 minutes if you already speak Korean ;) Otherwise, you'll have to learn to speak Korean (at least, learn the phonology of Korean) as you learn to read it, which will take more than 15 minutes.

Not entirely true. I learnt to read Korean before visiting South Korea. I don't understand a word (ok, actually I understand about 7 words in Korean and can count), but it really helps when reading street signs because you just need to look for directions to the nearest Palace and then find that on your map.

This was still a fantastic little primer - in the tech field, I think we all know a few people that know katakana and hiragana well enough to impress their friends by mentally sounding out an english cognate - "hey friends, this is a pharmacy up here" - the first 1% looks like magic to the rest of us.

Well... Taking Japanese in high school will do that to you. Hiragana and katakana are the first things you go over and it took a good part of the first year.

Korean is simpler by far. Just a couple weekends of looking at the rules and what they do. My problem is that I can't actually form the sounds in my head fast enough in order to know what the words mean.

I know how to sound out Cyrillic. I know very little Russian... usually not enough to tell if the language is Russian or some other Slavic language.

But I can still read. You see cognates every 10 or 15 words.

I read this link for 10 minutes, and I was wondering why it was spelled "golrum" since the Rattlesnake makes an R sound at the beginning of a triplet. Shouldn't he have used the empty "O" character on the second one?

Wish I could find something like this for Greek.

Excellent work condensing the alphabet into a single fun-to-read comic. Shameless self-promotion: http://langintro.com/kintro ; much slower paced, with exercises and other stuff.

I've got a site that has some basic Spanish grammar.

http://thespanishsite.com/spanish/grammar

http://thespanishsite.com

I'd like to repurpose it to cover the basics for several languages. With all the localization, it's handy to have a quick reference.

Plug: If you're learning Korean and have questions or just want to chat with other people in Korean and are familiar with IRC, #korean and #learnkorean on snoonet (irc.snoonet.org) always have people around who are also learning and/or willing to help others.

Too bad Korean is not written in mixed script (hanja + hangul) anymore. It is incredibly easy to understand texts and to focus on learning grammar rules once you have a signifiant Chinese character knowledge.

Not regularly but it is still mixed, particularly in literature. People still learn Hanja for benefit, albeit relatively minor.

I thought those were only used for street/place names, and sometimes business cards for family names?

Awesome. My name in Korean ( sort of ) http://imgur.com/BelRtBC

Ryan is a genius. This really works!

Should be 오 at the end there

Nice! Cool. :)

I've developed a beloved app to learn Korean

http://get.egg-convo.com

I lived in Korea for awhile, I still seem to remember the sounds of the letters, this was a good refresher.

This is really great! Thanks for posting