Learning some 한글

Causing a minor traffic jam at Costco.

This weekend has been relatively uneventful. I went shopping at Costco with some coworkers to buy food staples, enjoyed not working 8 hours a day, did some computer work I had hoped to do before I left Canada, and played with Chatroulette with my friends until the wee hours of the morning. Today I haven't really left my apartment building: I went outside to go to dinner, but went to a restaurant in the same building. Not exactly spellbinding blog material.

So instead, I will share my experience with the crazy doorbell system in my apartment.

The "doorbell" with video camera outside my door.

Instead of a perfectly sensible system of in-door peepholes and people knocking on the door, all the doors in our apartment building have video intercom systems. When the "doorbell" is pressed, there's a loud ringing noise from inside and a song played outside, and we can see the person standing outside on the phone located in our rooms.

The phone I mention has intrigued me because, although you can ignore it when someone rings and just answer the door, it has a host of buttons labeled in Korean. I spent a while trying to install Korean language support on my computer, and then started to translate the labels using Google Translate.

My door phone

This is what the labels say:

Top buttons: Crime Prevention, Test, Stop back
Text just underneath: Fire, Gas, In Use
Text above lower buttons: Power
Three lower buttons: Out, Security, Door open
Bbig green (?) button: Emergency

I learned a few things right away, such as "Don't press the big green button" and "This button can open the door, saving me a 3m walk" but overall, I'm just as mystified as before.

As a side note on technology, the lack of clarity in translation is partially due to the algorithms Google uses in its translator, which pick up statistical clues on a word's meaning from its surrounding words. Button labels don't have any surrounding words, and so don't benefit from this.

Translating the Hangul (Korean alphabet) on my phone is part trying to learn some Korean. As I learned today, the alphabet is actually very simple. There are about 10 simple vowels and 14 consonants. Each written symbol is one syllable, and is made up of two or three letters. They're just not written left to right - the first consonant is written at the top left, the vowel on the right and the ending consonant (if any) on the bottom.

For instance, let's spell my name in Korean. Similar to my Dad's experience in Italy, the Korean tongue doesn't have many of the sounds in my name (st or v, to be precise) so we'll substitute liberally.

Step one: substitute syllables in use in Korean. This makes Ste-ven into Seu-tee-ben, having inserted a short vowel sound between the s and the t, and replacing v with b, which indeed is the closest sound in Korean.

Step two: transliterate into Hangul.
SEU: S is ㅅ, EU is ㅡ, which together make 스
TEE: T is ㅌ, EE is ㅣ, which together make 티
So far, we've only dealt with two letter syllables, and they seem to be arranged in a way which makes sense for the shape of the vowel (EU goes under, and EE goes beside).
BEN: B is ㅂ and N is ㄴ. For reasons beyond my immediate ken, the symbol for E (the short e sound) combines EO and EE to give us ㅔ. Put them together and we get 벤.

We can continue with the last name (which is rather butchered into ma-ka-hee), and my name in Korean is 스티벤 마카히.

Not bad for a couple hours of learning a language!