Is there a site that does a better job translating than Babble Fish. Also is there a site or list that gives an acccurate Americanization of how to pronounce Korean words. I have seen it written so many different ways example: Anhya hasayo! or An ya ha sayo or Ayng yang ha sa yo ...... gets confusing for me. Is there any hope or do I just need to start getting into actually learning the language. Help an old guy out as the wife (my translator) just tells me go look it up on your computer.......................

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Just my humble opinion!

Shoot, there's as many ways to say it as there are to say hi, hello, how ya doing, how are you etc... Depends on the level of formality you are speaking. Best to take a class and buy a book. There are tons of good korean-english books out there that are adequate. There are lots of good programs on CD these days also.

It is the same phase but my problem is the correct pronunciation of it as I do not read or write Korean. Heck I still have trouble with English. My wife does not have the patience to teach me or maybe I don't have the patience to learn from her . Depends on which one of us is telling the story.

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Just my humble opinion!

here is my best shot at spelling it pheonetically for you, pronunciation will get you by anywhere. : On-Ya-Ha-Say-Yo. Its usually written as starting with an A but us poor Mi-Guks can't usually hear the difference. There are many pronunciation fine points when speaking or pheonetically writing the language but they are really fine points. As long as you make the basic effort and get close, most Koreans will understand you and forgive any slight exagerations of their peculiar sounds. A good thing to do is to get a list of the Korean vowels, written in Hangul and also in English and practice saying them to yourself. There are real fine distinctions between ah ya, oh yo and ooo yooo. Its been six years but if I remember right there is one between oh, yo and ooo yooo that sounds kind of like uu yuu. Takes lots of practice but don't give up. After awhile you will figure out how easy it will be to read street signs and business signs that are written in Hangul. Good luck brother.

Eddie V9 is our resident/Moderator- 한 글 (Han Gul) expert. He has been missing for a day or two. We all have different views, but similar. The part about the Miguk tongue working with the Han Guk language is so true. We'll post the alphabet and the most common English adaptations very soon, under the Korean Language Help area, for you guys not in Korea. ( SunJa is a real native expert, but stays busy most of the time.)

And Don't bother your wives with asking language questions! If they are like my wife, words have changed, and after 20+ years or so of speaking English, some of the old areas in the brain get filled up with recipes and other stuff!
Don't embarass them! They are too busy washing clothes, cleaning house, feeding kids that won't leave home, shining shoes, bringing you a beer, cleaning your fish, rowing the boat, skinning squirrels, cleaning your shotgun, feeding the dogs, and cooking all day long to be bothered with the stupid computer stuff you get involved in!

One very big problem with transliterating Korean into English is that there are several vowels that sound alike, so it's difficult to come up with a consistent way of doing it.

As far as online translation websites... they are all about the same because there are only a couple of machine translation engines (yes - that's exactly what that kind of software is called) for Korean. A tremendous amount of money will have to be invested to increase the current level of accuracy that the today's MT engines can achieve. There has to be 1) a source of funds and 2) a strong incentive (read: return on investment) for further development of the Korean/English MT engine. It will only come from two places: Korea and the US. I don't see it happening any time soon.

The MT engines for Japanese and Russian are considerably better - but that's because NSA worked on the Russian version for decades and the Japanese have spent a small fortune developing their version. But the Japanese had/have the money to do that.

The Japanese language is almost identical to Korean in terms of sentence structure and grammar. And of course, before either country had its own indigenous writing system, they both used Chinese characters for all their writing. And in both cases - those tens of thousands of Chinese words remained in the language after they developed their own alphabets. Japan continues to use Chinese characters as part of its written language and you cannot be literate in Japanese without knowing them. Korea has all but stopped using them for general purposes, and a Korean doesn't have to be able to read them to function in Korean society. There's a lot more to this story, but I've gotten way off track as it is. What I wanted to say is that there are only five vowels in the Japanese language, and almost all syllables in Japanese end in a vowel - so it makes it considerably easier to transliterate into English. Just think of some Japanese names and you'll see what I mean (Ha-shi-mo-to, Fu-ku-shi-ma, O-ki-na-wa...).

The beauty of hangul is that it is a very easy alphabet to learn. Each letter only has one pronunciation - if you learn it - you've got it. Of course, when you start putting certain combinations of letters together (especially in terms of how the last letter of one syllable mixes with the first letter of the follow on syllable), special rules come into play, and the pronunciations change a bit. But that's where good ear/listening development comes in.

There are many times when you think you hear something being said a certain way - and then you see how it's written - and then you realize what you thought you had been hearing is wrong. An example: a lot of non-natives pronounce the word to address a man as "a-da-shi." However, the actual pronunciation is "a-juh-shi" (아저씨).

Just get yourself a basic alphabet lesson book and start learning the letters, and in a matter of no time, you should be able to at least sound out most words that you see. You may not know what they mean - but you'll know how to pronounce them.

Think I may have to add you as a resident expert also! I just don't know you well. You seem to be "Spot On" -as I was called a while back. (Is that a British term? I'm guessing it is?)

I agree- and hope I (we) don't make anyone upset by repeating over and over
how it is not difficult to learn 10 vowels and 14 consonants. It isn't! And when that first recognizable word is written a light bulb flashes, and you want to read MORE! I'm here to tell you. I still stop on the street and read signs in Korea every day. Sometimes I'm late returning from lunch.

I'm busy lately, but I promise to put vowels & consonants down here soon, unless- If one of you experts has time now-Please do!
This little program that allows Korean to be typed is built into every machine that has Windows XP! The hard part, for those in other countries, is the keyboard. Nothing that money can't cure, I can buy good combination English/Korean keyboards for $7 and ship to you for another $13 I think. Or we can just make a conversion key for you until you want to upgrade. Talk among yourselves. 조 씨

PS-this clock is off again- the real time is 9:06 PM on 11 May!

Wow yours does all that! Mine thinks washing clothes is her hobby but does spend a lot of time watching Korean Soap Opera and utilizing the nationwide calling plan to it's greatest extent. LOL

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Just my humble opinion!

I just did a quick google search for "hangul." Not too surprisingly, there are several sites out there. I looked at five or six of them. This one in particularly stood out as being a pretty good place to start learning hangul. It teaches how to write it and it also has recordings for each of the letters and consonants. It's goes well beyond that - but no need to get ahead of the beginners.

http://park.org/Korea/Pavilions/Publ...hangul/school/

Thanks Willy
I will see if my old brain will work with it. I think part of my problem is that I have had my wife to translate for so long my brain got lazy.

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Just my humble opinion!