News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes by bane on Thursday July 23, 2015 @09:54AM (#9935705)
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.

Re:Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes by keerthiko on Thursday July 23, 2015 @11:07AM (#9936179)
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.

Re:Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes by bane on Thursday July 23, 2015 @02:00PM (#9937401)
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.