Hey there memrise.com friends. I’m learning Korean with this wonderful website and something has caught my attention. It is my impression that sometimes the system will tell me that “Please (polite)” is written: “butag habnida” and sometimes “butak habnida”. I can’t get my head around this. It seems to be a glitch.
When i write BUTAG the system corrects me and says it’s BUTAK and viceversa.
Am i misssing a point here? Has anybody experienced something like this before?
Thanks very much for your time.
That is probably an error in course design. Two items/words have the same English part but different Korean parts. One is romanized in one way and the other in different way.
I would advise to ignore (it’s a function in the system) one of those items.
Even better advice would be to stop learning romanization. You should only use romanization to learn Korean alphabet which is very easy. Once you learn it you won’t have problems with romanization, which is inaccurate.
As a few others had already stated, I would strongly advice too, to read and write directly in Korean. Korean is already a “pronunciation language”, pretty much like our English phonetics. Romanization is redundant because you can denote the pronunciation of any word using Korean itself. Unless you are completely new to Korean, and want to be able to read something fast, there isn’t any need for romanization. Although some textbooks written specifically for foreigners do come with romanization, they’re there to aid you, not a standard for you to learn. Korean textbooks do not use romanization, and tests in the real world do not accept romanization.