In my
Korean 301 class, we have various assignments where we need to change Korean
words (Hangul) to English letters so that we know how a word is pronounced.
We call this “Romanization.” Romanization in its definition it “to transcribe or
transliterate (a language) into the Roman alphabet” (thefreedictionary.com). For
any language that does not have a Latin-based root, such as Chinese, Korean,
Japanese, Arabic, and a number of others, they can be written in Latin-based letters, or English, based
on their sounds.
 |
| That says, "English Notations of Hangul" |
When I
first started learning Korean, I found it easier to read the letters themselves
instead of the Romanized version of them. Now, reading Romanized Korean just
gives me a headache because I am basically reading two languages at once. I
would rather just read the actual Korean letters, and not have them written out
in English.
Sometimes the Romanized version of a word can be ambiguous, depending on the language. A
very common Korean last name is “이”
(pronounced “ee”). This last name, when Romanized, is “Lee” most of the time,
but is also Romanized as “Ree” and “I.”
I am not
trying to degrade what the Romans did for us in terms of Romanization, because
the Romanization of languages helps when you cannot pronounce a certain word. I
may not like reading Korean when it is Romanized, but it sure helped me when I
was learning the Korean alphabet for the first time.
