I got a travelguide to Korea recently and was looking through it when I came across an interesting little section giving some Korean phrases.
If you know me, you know I absolutely hate romanization. Yes, I know it has its place. The problem is that the systems used for romanizing Korean int0 English have many issues. You have to pretty much choose the old system which used letters not found on keyboards or the newer system which tries to hard to mimic the written language instead of the spoken. Here’s some examples that could probably be romanized better:
신용 = sinyong (should be shinyong IMO)
실례 = sillye (should be something like shillye)
감사합니다 = Gamsa-hamnida (should be kamsamnida IMO)
Does anyone else see the problem here? This romanization system tries to translate exactly character for character. That is exactly what it should NOT do. If you’re going to use a romanization system for people that don’t know Korean, then at least make it so it reads like it sounds instead of how it’s written.
Hey there,
You’re definitely correct that Romanization would be a lot better – but your examples are technically incorrect. When the ‘s’ (ㅅ) is followed by an i (ㅣ) the resulting syllable sounds like ‘shi’, or ‘she’ (as opposed to ‘he’). That’s not technically how it’s romanized, supposedly to prevent confusion as to why some ㅅ’s are translated as ‘s’ or ‘sh’.
Regarding 감사합니다, the ㄱ character is usually romanized as ‘g’ if it’s the first consonant and ‘k’ if it’s in the padchim (or final character). That’s why 왜국인 (wae-guk-in, or foreigner) is romanized as such. Under that rule, misspellings such as ‘kimbap’ or ‘hagwon’ occur – and are quite common. Since the pronunciaton is the same – a soft ‘k’ – it sounds the same to Koreans.
I wouldn’t worry too much about romanization – once you’re here and you’re writing or speaking, you won’t be romanizing that much. Best of luck
@Chris in South Korea
Thanks Chris. Yeah, I really shouldn’t worry. It’s just one of those little pesky things that gets me for some reason. I studied Chinese, German, French, and a little bit of Japanese and all their systems made sense. I think whenever I see romanization in the future I need to avert my eyes because I’ll just start thinking about how much I hate it … Murphy’s law: Just because I said that, I’ll probably get a job after which I find out I have to romanize 한글 … please no.
Yep I hate Korean Romanization too! But as Chris said, you won’t have to deal with it in Korea since you’ll only see it in the subways for the tourists who can’t read. But… you’ll have to deal with the ridiculous method of spelling English terms in Korean. The more words you learn, the more frustrating it is. lol
Also, you must have studied Japanese Romanization via the American method. Have you ever taken a look at Japanese-style Romanization? Lots of problems.