“Each was developed based on the audience and purposes in mind,” she said. She explained that Korean was romanized using two common systems: the McCune-Reischauer and the Korean Revised Romanization system. Joy Kim is a curator at the University of Southern California’s Korean Heritage Library who works with standardizing romanization systems across libraries. Transliteration is the process of phonetically converting one language into another, while romanization refers specifically to converting non-Latin scripts, like the Cyrillic alphabet, Arabic or Korean Hangul, into the Latin (also known as Roman) alphabet that we use in languages like English, French and Spanish.Ĭontrary to my assumption that Korean words were transliterated into English based on vibes only, the history of Korean romanization is deliberate, complex and fickle. Romanization and transliteration allow languages to be accessible to nonspeakers. But to live in a globalized and pluralistic world means we must find ways to communicate across language boundaries. This is the trouble in trying to capture one language in another: Each language exists on its own and contains phonetic expressions that are difficult, and sometimes impossible, to capture in another language’s alphabet. For a moment, I felt alienated from this language I’ve known my whole life. My task was to match the letter with its romanization, but the Roman letters didn’t match with my recollection of the pronunciation of the language I’d been spoken to since I was born.

The first lessons are intended to teach users the basic Hangul letters, to match the sounds with the letters and then begin putting them together.

In Duolingo, you must start from the beginning. With such a convenient tool at my disposal, why wouldn’t I replace my doomscrolling with a little language learning? Language learning apps like Duolingo promise to turn our previously wasted social media scrolling time into productive bursts of self-improvement. I recently downloaded Duolingo in an attempt to regain some of my fluency.

I have a solid grasp of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, however, and a smattering of basic survival words, most of which I learned at home when my mother urged me to “bballi bballi mogo” - eat faster, faster. Over time, though, English took over as my primary language. I was born in the United States, but raised by my Korean mother, who exposed me to her language early and consistently.

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