아침놀 Blog

Today is one of national holiday, "Hangul Day". This day is for celebrating creation of Korean alphabets, Hangul. It is a truly wonderful achievement of our nation with almost no illiterat people. Even we have sayings like "One doesn't know Giyeok(ㄱ) with a sickle.", which means the one is a fool because Hangul is so easy that everyone should know.

However, we have very many issues about Hangul in the computer world because typical softwares and operating systems were designed by single-language speaking people such as US Americans. Many foreign computer games like Supreme Commander does not support to type Hangul in them. (Games of Blizzard are the significant exceptions.)

Recently, problems of displaying Hangul became just ignorable for that many softwares now use Unicode and almost all operating systems have Unicode fonts (although some of them are not pretty for native Koreans).

Problem 1: Fonts

For Latin characters, major operating systems like Microsoft Windows and Apple MacOSX share a set of common fonts--Arial, Times New Roman, Courier, Impact, Comic Sans MS, Georgia, Lucida Console, Lucida Sans, Palatino, Trebuchet MS/Helvetica and Tahoma/Geneva. This fact makes web designs to have diversity and beauty with consistent looks in many different OSs. I think this is why W3C had not worked actively on web fonts specification.

But for Korean font, the situation is very bad. With monopoly of Microsoft Windows, the four major fonts that are the basic fonts of Korean Windows also monopolized. They are Gulim(굴림), Dotum(돋움), Batang(바탕) and Gungseo(궁서). The former two are sans-serif, and the laters are serif. In small sizes like 10pt, they are displayed with bitmaps because in the past anti-aliasing techniques were not good enough to improve readability on complicated Esatern Asian characters including Hangul.

The problem is, the most frequently used Gulim is made from Japanese font, Naru, and has been criticized for destructing native goemetry and beauty of Hangul. Many web designers also doesn't like it, but they have no other option except Dotum, but also not pretty. So using images for titles and brochures became very common to use commercial fonts like YoonGothic(윤고딕). Here, another problem is making a new Korean font requires huge amount of costs and time. You just need design about 100 characters for basic Latin font, but for Unicode Korean, we need 11,172 + alpha characters. If you want make it more perfect, you also have to include common Chinese characters, which may be another thousands. So many good fonts were developed as commercial, non-free, and not popularized, and consequently, web designers couldn't avoid to use images instead of text.

Some sample Hangul fonts

Windows Vista is a very remarkable version for Koreans because it first introduced a new default UI font, Malgun Gothic(맑은 고딕), with clear-type enabled. Yes, finally we "graduated" the bitmap font era. Also many local governments like Seoul and major IT companies are developing new vector fonts and releasing them free to improve their brand images. This will make the situation better, but still it's not good enough like they're embedded in operating systems.

For programmers, separating English font and Korean font is very important to get good readability, because usually auto-selected fonts for monspace Latin font is generally very unreadable. Fortunately, my favorite text editor gVim support this, but SSH client PuTTY didn't. So I had to make a patch--dPuTTY.

Comparison of separated fonts and auto-selected fonts

Problem 2: IME

All major operating systems provides internationalized input with their own IME subsystems. Especially, CJK¹ characters need complicated IME with automata and dictionaries.

On Microsoft Windows, the operating system offers a series of Input Method APIs. They encapsulates the composition process, so applications need to know just whether the composition is begun, being done, finished. Of course, they have to update their text view or edit controls on those events from IME.

If an application does not support IME interaction, Windows will do a fall-back like this:

Compare with this native behaviour:

The later one feels much more comfortable for Korean people. Enabling the application to interact with native IME is very very important for internationalization.

There is another important problem of IME. There are NO operating systems that make user able to know the IME state conveniently. Users must look around or move their eyes to see the IME toolbar to detect whether the current input mode is Hangul or English. Why Microsoft or Apple hasn't changed the color or shape of input cursor according to IME status? I think just they weren't aware of this problem because they don't use IME and don't switch two languages frequently.

There were a few softwares that implemented this feature in the past, but currently we don't have those softwares in our major computing environment. Almost every software uses only Windows' native IME features as provided.

* * *

Internationalizing a software truly involves headaching problems in many cases. There are other problems with file encoding, mp3 tag encoding, ANSI applications with AppLocale and many many. I hope Latin-language speaking developer would consider basic i18n habits more. Sometimes, I imagine what if modern computer or operating systems were designed in Korea. :P

• Web 2.0 Asia: We've been Googled!
• TechnoKimchi.com: Breaking News: Google buys TNC (and Tattertools/Textcube)

I'm going to add some details to this big news. Textcube¹ itself is an open-source blogging software developed by TNF² and Needlworks³, and sponsored by TNC. Some of TNC members also have been contributed to the project. (Note: We haven't finished i18n of our websites.)

Google didn't buy or acquire Textcube and its developer's community TNF/Needlworks, but Textcube.com which is a blogging service based on Textcube and developed/operated by TNC. So mentioning "dot com" is very important to distinguish these two different projects although one is derived from the other. To avoid confusion, I recommend adding "dot org" after Textcube when you mention the open-source project.

Textcube was formerly known as Tattertools. It was developed by Jaehoon Jeong, and was not open-source at first. Chestor Roh established TNC and made Tattertools open-source, and I began to contribute from then. TNC has been developing commercial services dervied from Tattertools/Textcube. Tistory based on old Tattertools was sold to Daum, and Textcube.com based on new Textcube was sold to Google with Eolin and their owner TNC at this time.

Now Tattertools means "Project Tattertools", and the software was renamed to "Textcube". Project Tattertools includes all softwares which have data compatility and portability via TTXML⁴. Currently there are no software that actually support this outside the derivatives of original Tattertools, but we hope so in the future.

TNC also has been provided a superb anti-spam filtering API as a plugin of Textcube, "Eolin Antispam Service". This can be compared to Akismet of Wordpress.

Well, Needlworks and I have very close relationship with TNC, but I don't know details of this acquisition (because it's confidential, it's not exposed to us of course). The event may cause some changes of our works, such as standardization of TTXML/TTSKIN and sponsorhsip, but TNF/Needlworks and Textcube will remain non-profit open-source organization and product, so don't worry. :)

It was exactly 39 days ago when I left Sweden. I've been busy for many things, such as interviews for software engineer internship of Google Korea¹, and also Textcube 2.0 designing and prototyping.

Well, just after I came back to Korea, I found a very good website that provides Korean-learning materials. Here is the link. :P It has several subscription options including both free and paid. I think the free one should be sufficient to learn basic Korean.

Instead of introducing details of Korean language, I'm going to tell about my normal life and Korean culture in many aspects, for example, favorite websites used by Korean people, famous vacation places, and traditional foods.

I'm not sure that I could keep writing bilingual posts here, but I'm planning to add a function which enables multi-lingual posts for Textcube 2.0. Then, I will be able to provide more convenient reading to foreign visitors.

For those who have lived in Stockholm, these views will be very strange. In the near area of Seoul, the capital of South Korea, there are many many numbers of apartments because of high population density. (Seoul itself has about 11 million people, and its near area has also another 10 million people.)

A view from my room's window

My home is approximately 40 km away from the city center of Seoul.

As you see in the photoes, there are also many mountains. Because 70% of Korean Peninsula is covered with mountains, it's hard to see flat horizons except few regions. But in Stockholm, you can see very far horizons when you are on high position such as Gröna Lund's Fritt Fall.

My town.

This kind of high-density accommodation made it possible to spread broad-band networks over large populations very easily. So most of homes in the photoes has 100 Mbps internet connections via optic fibers attached to the main control room of each building.

Well, how about your homes? =)

For foreign friends who might read this blog, I announce(?) that I arrvied at South Korea, my home.

A sign in Incheon International Airport

I arrived here in the late evening of 22nd, June. The reason why I posted this so late is I just slept too much due to jet lags.

Still, I have to check my score sheet to be sent to my home university, but all other things related to 'the life in Sweden' is now finished. I have already applied for an internship program during the next semester, and I will find a job to replace my military duty in this winter.

It was a great experience to live in a foreign country, especially Sweden, such a well-developed one. It made my sight far broader. Now I know that the way of life has far more possibilities.

I think some of my friends who was in Sweden may have returned to their home countries or others are still staying there. I wish all your journeys to home with good luck! :D

As I said in the first introduction, the best way to learn exact pronunciation is making a Korean friend, or listen to pronunciations of native speakers. Although, I want to show you as possible.

You may have seen a famous American TV series 'Lost'. There appear a Korean actor and an actress. The actor Daniel Dae Kim is not an actual native speaker though he was born in South Korea because he immigrated to United States at two years old. So that's why his pronunciation looks weird and funny for native speakers. (Some people even say it's addictive.) -_-; But the actress Yunjin Kim's pronunciation is more native.

Romanization of Korean

There are several methods to express Korean pronunciations using Latin characters. The current standardized system is Revised Romanization of Korean, also called 'RR'. Formerly used one is McCune-Reischauer method. But neither two methods are completely reflecting actual Korean. Anyway what I used here to express pronunciations is RR method.

Rules to make it fluent

The Korean character system, "Hangul", represents the sounds of Korean. But not to make it confusing, another main principle to write Korean is to keep the original forms of words.

Thus, sometimes spoken Korean differs from written Korean. There are some rules to convert written Korean to spoken Korean as a standard. Here is an article about this topic. (The romanization used in this article is not RR, but IPA.) Though it's explaining in Korean, but I think you may be able to see what kinds of differences exist if you know the components of Hangul.

This article explains how to use Korean dictionaries to find out the meaning of new words you meet.

How to type Korean in your computer?

I think most of you, epsecially Western people, would have difficulties to get a Korean dictionary book with your native languages or English here. So I recommend you to use some free web dictionaries.

Before that, you should be able to input Korean characters on your computer. I found a good guide to do this.

• Installing Korean IME in Windows Vista¹
• Installing Korean IME in Windows XP²

For MacOSX, you can just activate Korean Input Method in the international panel of the system preferences dialog. You can also see character palettes to see which key is mapped which Hangul jamo.

Using free Kor-Eng/Eng-Kor web dictionaries

Now you can use Korean-English dictionaries on the web. I recommend you to use Naver English Dictionary. It's all Korean, but you should be able to find the input box in the main screen. You may type both Korean or English words to translate into each other.

You would see something similar to this if you have correctly installed Korean fonts.

For verbs and adjectives, you should use a default(dictionary) form, for example, '-하다'. I will explain the variation of Korean verbs soon.

An example of using it. If that word have multiple meanings or uses, then it shows a list of entries.

You may also try English words like this. For Chinese and Japanese people, Naver also provides Chinese/Japanese dictionary. Though these dictionaries are designed for Korean, but it might be more helpful for you than English ones.

Now, it's time to begin some grammar-related things. I think the most easiest part to learn in languages is nouns, so this post is about Korean nouns.

Basic Vocabulary

To make it more interesting, you need to know some basic vocabularies.

I will show family names in the following lecture.

Same Pronunciation with Different Meanings

Because Korean has much more simplified pronunciations than Chinese has, there are many words that have different meanings but same pronunciations. In fact, sometimes there are differences on the length of vowels which are usually ignored by Koreans. Koreans determine the meanings depending on the context.

Nouns from Foreign(Latin) Languages

We approximate² the pronunciations of words from English, French, and other languages. Sometimes those approximation are different between North Korea and South Korea because dialects of North Korea have stronger consonants and heavily affected by Russia. Here, I will use only South Korean.

Some words are transformed under influence by Japanese, or just "Konglish" (Korean English).

And of course, the names of many countries and regions in the world are in this category.

and many others.

But the names of some countries which were introduced by Japan or in earlier periods are used in Hanja representations.

The name of our country, "Korea", is made from the name a kingdom which existed at the medieval age in the Korean peninsula, "고려(高麗)". This kingdom had very activated trades of many products with other countries including China and Arabs.

Subjective & Objective Form and Pronouns

Basically, we don't distinguish subjective and objective forms because we have postpositions that indicates the role of the words which it decorates. I will introduce postpositions later.

To make them adjectives, like 'my', 'your', 'his', and etc, you can just append a postposition '~의'. Exceptionally 'my' and 'your' can be also used as '내/제' and '네' respectively. To represent someone's belongings, just append another word '것' which means (some)thing, like 'mine' = '나의 것/내 것/제 것', 'yours' = '너의 것/네 것', and 'his' = '그의', '그의 것'.

Single and Plural

To make nouns plural, you may just append a suffix '들' like '-s' or '-es' in English. There is no variation of original nouns. But Korean language does not strictly distinguish single and plural nouns, so this can be omitted in many cases. Usually if a noun is decorated by adjectives or used as a subject, then the plural form is more frequently used.

Articles

Korean does not have articles such as 'a', 'an', and 'the' in English. You can just put nouns in proper positions without any articles and any pluralization. If you want to emphasize that a noun is single, you may use '한'(the attributive form of ordinal number/native cardinal one) in front of it, but this is not necessary and actually unnatural in many contexts.

There is no strict separation between uncountable and countable nouns. They are countable or uncountable only conceptually, with no grammatical differences due to absence of articles. Of course, we don't pluralize uncountable nouns such as '사랑' which means 'love'.

In fact, putting proper articles for various abstract nouns is the most difficult part for Koreans when they learn English. (Maybe this post has also many mistakes about this.)

Basically Korean uses the same system of Western society (Gregorian calendar) to represent dates and times. The standard time zone of South Korea is GMT+09:00 without the summer time period. It's same to Tokyo, Japan.

For traditional holidays, we count them on a lunar calendar which is based on Chinese calendar. We don't have any traditional holidays based on weekdays like United States (eg. Thanksgiving day is the fourth Thursday of November in U.S.) because we didn't have the weekday concept before Western culture was introduced.

We had a very different calendar system at the past, which divided a year into 24 periods and count the year based on the starting years of kings' ruling period¹ or 60 years of "Kanji" cycles. Before using the concept of weeks, China and Korea usually divided a month into 5 or 10 days. I will introduce this traditional calendar system on another post later.

Weekdays

You may notice the name of monday and sunday have the same meaning to English ones. Also other names have some relations to English names.³ For example, saturday is come from 'Saturn' which also means the sixth planet of our solar system and we say that planet as '토성(土星)'. These weekdays names are influenced by Japan that uses same names.⁴

5-days work on a week is now widely accepted in South Korea, so the friday is beginning of weekends like most Western countries, but without shortened work time at that day. (In Sweden, the work time on fridays is often shorter than other weekdays, but in Korea, there is almost no exceptions.)

Saying Years, Months and Days

We write dates in 'Year Month Day' order while Americans use 'Month Day Year' and Sweden uses 'Day Month Year'. Almost everybody knows English month names though they are not used frequently in Korea, and there are no month names in (modern) Korean.⁵

So we just say January as '1월', February as '2월', ..., December as '12월'. The character '월' is Korean pronunciation of Chinese character '月' which means month or the moon. All numbers in dates are said in the cardinal number form.

Generally, year is '년(年)', month is '월(月)', and day is '일(日)' or '날'⁶.
Example: April 12, 2008 = 2008년 4월 12일 (이천팔년 사월 십이일)

Usually 3000BC is said '기원전(紀元前) 3000년' and AD2000 (or CE2000) is said '기원후(紀元後) 2000년' in some historical contexts. '기원' means a specific moment of a historic event depending on the context--here, the birth of Jesus Christ.

Saying Time

To say hours in Korean, you should use ordinal numbers, but cardinal numbers for minutes and seconds.

I think it would be faster to look some examples.

We don't have some varied expressions to say times such as 'ten past twelve', 'a quarter past three', etc in English, but just say the exact numbers.

General Nouns about Times

Time Span

We use '시간(時間)' instead of '시(時)' and other parts are same.⁷

Using numbers in Korean is very similar to Japanese and Chinese because those three use same Chinese numbers with different pronunciations. But this fact is applied for only cardinal numbers(one, two, three, ...), not ordinal numbers (eg. first, second, third, ...).

Basic Reading

Actually, these ordinal numbers are not actually ordinal. They are original-Korean numbers, and used to make real ordinal numbers in some contexts. (So if you use this forms as it is, it's not an ordinal number. To know how to use them, see the end of this post.)

English-like languages have special notations for 11 and 12, but Korean-like languages doesn't have such exceptions.

English puts a comma between every 3-digits because it uses 'thousands' scaling, but Korean puts it between every 4-digits because it uses 'ten-thousands(만)' scaling. However, 3-digits separation is more frequently used in the real life such as banks.

Some examples:

If you use 1 in places of larger than 10000, we usually add a prefix '일'(1) to the number. So 1000,0001 is 일억일, not 억일, but 1,0000 is 만, not 일만. (You may use '일만', but it's only in some formal notations.)
It's easy to think the last example as 1x10⁸ (일x억) + 2345x10⁴ (이천삼백사십오x만) + 6789x1 (육천칠백팔십구). If you want test yourself, there is a perl script that converts arabic numbers to Korean pronunciations. (Note that the script uses CP949 or EUC-KR encoding, not UTF-8. But I think if you copy & paste its source code in UTF-8 encoding, then it will run well in UTF-8 encoding.)

Floating numbers

To speak floating numbers, you can say '.' as 점, and the following digits in 1-digit numbers, such as:
10