<story><title>How to read Korean in 15 minutes</title><url>http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/20461267965#notes</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wheels</author><text>People overestimate the difficulty in learning different alphabets (and the assumed difficulty of the languages which use them).&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m on vacation in Israel this week and learned the Hebrew alphabet with standard flash cards in 2 hours (incidentally by doing something similar to this post by remembering the names based on something the character looks like).  At various points I&apos;ve learned the Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets in a similar amount of time.&lt;p&gt;The real difficulty is, naturally, actually learning the language.  The additional burden of it using a separate regular alphabet is negligible in comparison.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to read Korean in 15 minutes</title><url>http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/20461267965#notes</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ghiotion</author><text>Wow.  That is really neat.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve always believed that spoken languages that are constructed/contrived are doomed to failure (esperanto, klingon, etc).  I&apos;m not saying that Korean itself is contrived, but it&apos;s fascinating that the alphabet was created like that.</text></comment>