Author Topic: Classroom Poster for Romanising Korean Names (Read 4149 times)

dream_a_happy · « **on:** March 06, 2015, 04:54:36 PM »

A lot of my students still don't know how to write their names in English after studying the language for years, and the majority have no clue how to romanise things like Korean place names or foods, so I made this romanisation chart to stick up in the classroom. It prints on 4 B4 sheets (1 is top left, 2 is bottom left, 3 is top right etc).

The Korean on the second page explains how to write syllables, so their name can be written as Minsu, Min Su or Min-su, according to their preference. The Korean on the last page explains that this poster shows the current government accepted romanisation, but that many names don't stick to it (eg, Park instead of Bak, Kim instead of Gim).

In class, I explained that g/k means that it's a g at the start of a syllable and k at the end (so 국 becomes guk), but my low level students sometimes get confused with 영 and write ngyeong instead of yeong, so you might want to make sure they understand that one.

This poster isn't perfect. Romanisation can get a bit complicated, and I didn't want to bog the poster down with too much information. But I think this covers the basics. Hopefully it can be useful for some other teachers.

nzer-in-gyeongnam · « **Reply #1 on:** March 06, 2015, 05:06:42 PM »

That's a great poster!
I have the same problem with my students. Currently, I am working on something similar.

I made this jpg and am planning to make it into a little more 'user friendly' size to stick into the front of their textbooks so they always have a reference to use.

I hope that soon enough students will be knowing how to write their names into English. My co-teachers and I are on a mission to get them to do this at present, so your poster may feature on our walls along with my images in their textbooks.

Edit: The second file, the 'user friendly' is uploaded as a publisher file.
The file has 3 copies of the .jpg on one page, to be cut down so students can glue it into their books. It also has 2 pages that are identical, of 8 copies of the .jpg. My intention with this is to cut them down and then laminate them so that students can put a copy in their wallet or bag or pencil case, so they always have a copy with them.

My co-teacher and I will be teaching the students the rule about ㅇ and it's non-value before a vowel in class, so that is why it is not mentioned on the file.

I created this .jpg myself, based upon several others available online, but when attempting to use them for myself, they were always unfocused. When I was first learning Korean, I made this .jpg for myself, and have planned to use it with students for years, but never got around to it. This year, I am surprised by the number of middle school 3rd graders who STILL can not write their own names in English, and so I am trying to get proactive on it now.

artsl · « **Reply #2 on:** March 07, 2015, 01:53:06 PM »

Thanks.
Could you please post more 'user friendly' version as you make it, as well?
Thanks, again!

lianney · « **Reply #3 on:** March 10, 2015, 05:04:01 PM »

This gets tricky.

My Korean name is 윤희. It is romanized as Yunhui, but on my birth certificate (it is currently my middle name) it is Yoonhee, which sounds exactly how it is pronounced. This website would be Oeguk.com if it was according to the official romanization. I don't know how "어" became "eo". If I didn't know anything about Korea, I would pronounce "Jeonju" as "Jee-ohn ju". Just my little rant about romanization! I always recommend people to learn hangeul first before studying Korean and never use romanized letters!

dream_a_happy · « **Reply #4 on:** March 10, 2015, 05:37:24 PM »

Quote from: lianney on March 10, 2015, 05:04:01 PM

This gets tricky.

My Korean name is 윤희. It is romanized as Yunhui, but on my birth certificate (it is currently my middle name) it is Yoonhee, which sounds exactly how it is pronounced. This website would be Oeguk.com if it was according to the official romanization. I don't know how "어" became "eo". If I didn't know anything about Korea, I would pronounce "Jeonju" as "Jee-ohn ju". Just my little rant about romanization! I always recommend people to learn hangeul first before studying Korean and never use romanized letters!

I would never recommend using romanisation for people learning Korean, but for our Korean students using English it can be useful when they want to write things like "I live in Daegu" or "I like tteokbokki." My students especially are very low level, so when they try to write their names phonetically, a lot of the time it just comes out as unintelligible.

Personally, I think it's important to have a standard. 어 is always the most problematic. A lot of the time, it gets written as "u", which is also used for "우." So if one of my students writes their names as "Yunjin," I'm not always sure if they mean 윤진 or 연진. 우 as "oo" doesn't matter, because there's no other letter that's written as "oo" to confuse it with. "eo" might not read naturally to some as 어 on first sight, but if it's always written like that, at least people can learn it.

I don't think it'd be possible to make a romanisation system that's 100% intuitive. After all, even English speakers would pronounce something like "a" differently, depending on where they're from. And of course, the romanised Korean isn't made just for English speakers. It's for anyone that uses the roman alphabet.

That said, it is your own name and at the end of the day you can write it any way you darn well please. If one of my kids insists that their name is spelt a certain way, who am I to argue? That's why I made a note on the poster that not all names follow the official standard.

Paul · « **Reply #5 on:** March 10, 2015, 06:45:39 PM »

Quote from: lianney on March 10, 2015, 05:04:01 PM

I don't know how "어" became "eo". If I didn't know anything about Korea, I would pronounce "Jeonju" as "Jee-ohn ju". Just my little rant about romanization! I always recommend people to learn hangeul first before studying Korean and never use romanized letters!

The tale that used to be passed around was that '어' was chosen so Seoul could retain its traditional French spelling.^[1]

It's tricky to begin with because the pronunciation of that jamo varies a bit, anywhere from the standard /˄/ up in Seoul to something closer to /ɒ/ in the provinces. Then, to complicate matters further I've noticed that it sometimes gets employed as a stand-in for a final schwa (/ə/, 으) in loanwords from English.

On the bright side 'eo' is so alien that it's just as likely to spur the reader to outright ask for the correct pronunciation, which can't be a bad thing. Just a shame it completely falls apart for places like Geoje-do. At the end of the day though, names are personal, so non-standard forms are A-OK, which is good news for students with a 거 or a 시.

johnny russian · « **Reply #6 on:** March 10, 2015, 08:08:50 PM »

this is the romanization system endorsed by the Korean government, so i think any romanization chart should use this system and this alone:

http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/CU/CU_EN_8_6_3_1.jsp

nzer-in-gyeongnam · « **Reply #7 on:** March 10, 2015, 11:11:05 PM »

Quote from: johnny russian on March 10, 2015, 08:08:50 PM

this is the romanization system endorsed by the Korean government, so i think any romanization chart should use this system and this alone:

http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/CU/CU_EN_8_6_3_1.jsp

This website just reiterates the chart I provided above. It is the same thing... I have just combined vowels and consonants to their respective groups so as to make it easy for my students to see what they are to be using.

Thank you for providing the link though. It does solidify what is being taught.

Oh, and while I agree with the idea of learning Korean characters before learning Korean, some people don't do that, and so while I did learn characters immediately, when I began learning, my husband doesn't learn characters, and needed a conversion chart. Therefore, I created the chart for him to understand what he was reading.

This chart is also very useful for students when they are learning how to write their names in English, and when they are learning how to write commonly used Korean words into English too.

forasong · « **Reply #8 on:** March 11, 2015, 12:51:57 PM »

I suppose I shouldn't really care that much but for personal names:

Kim DaeJeon just looks a lot better to me than Kim Dae-jeon or Kim Daejeon.

I have a McMichael in my name so I guess I'm partial to the mid-name capitalization.

Capitalization highlights the two equally important (Chinese/Korean) characters in the first name. Plus its cool and doesn't use up space. Hyphens? Really?

:)

dream_a_happy · « **Reply #9 on:** March 11, 2015, 01:34:49 PM »

Quote from: forasong on March 11, 2015, 12:51:57 PM

Hyphens? Really?

:)

I can't argue with the president

jayrenegade · « **Reply #10 on:** March 11, 2015, 03:50:56 PM »

Thanks to the OP for your poster. It's exactly what I needed. My new 3rd graders are getting all mixed up about their names, and this will really help them work it out.

aklimkewicz · « **Reply #11 on:** March 11, 2015, 05:15:48 PM »

Quote from: forasong on March 11, 2015, 12:51:57 PM

I suppose I shouldn't really care that much but for personal names:

Kim DaeJeon just looks a lot better to me than Kim Dae-jeon or Kim Daejeon.

I have a McMichael in my name so I guess I'm partial to the mid-name capitalization.

Capitalization highlights the two equally important (Chinese/Korean) characters in the first name. Plus its cool and doesn't use up space. Hyphens? Really?

:)

Personally speaking, I prefer each name to be capitalized and to have a space after it. So, Kim Dae Jeon. But, I have a Klimkewicz in my name, so I'm not exactly into saving space.

Mezoti97 · « **Reply #12 on:** March 11, 2015, 08:12:28 PM »

Quote from: lianney on March 10, 2015, 05:04:01 PM

I don't know how "어" became "eo". If I didn't know anything about Korea, I would pronounce "Jeonju" as "Jee-ohn ju". Just my little rant about romanization! I always recommend people to learn hangeul first before studying Korean and never use romanized letters!

Before I moved to Korea, there was a Korean restaurant in the area near where I was living at the time that had the syllable "jeon" as part of the restaurant name. I remember one of my roommates at the time thought it was pronounced "jee-ohn," too. Haha.

weigookin74 · « **Reply #13 on:** March 12, 2015, 11:55:26 AM »

This is how the Koreans write it. There are exceptions to the rule, especially for Family names and companies like "Samsung"which should be written as "Samseong" according to these rules. "Kim" should become "Gim"according to these rules. These Romanization rules were put into place in the year 2000, I believe. So, some older texts, North Korea, and the odd sign in the countryside wil still have different spellings.

Some are not accurate of course, but it's just the way they do it. For example, one I really don't like is 외국인 which is spealled woegukin. I would read it as Whoa - guhk - in.
But, it's pronounced as my name - weigookin plus a lucky number plus the day in December which I first arrived in hangook (hanguk).

It's not perfect, but it's probably easier than what they used before. If you want to know how to pronounce Korean word properly due to different English spellings, learn Hangeul and then deprogram your natural pronounciation of letters when it comes to Korean. (They say Chinese with pinyin is far worse in thisregard with letters not being pronounced properly.)

Paul · « **Reply #14 on:** March 12, 2015, 04:44:43 PM »

Quote from: weigookin74 on March 12, 2015, 11:55:26 AM

... learn Hangeul and then deprogram your natural pronounciation of letters when it comes to Korean.

What you have to watch out for isn't so much this but the opposite. I mean, in printed English material, Romanisation is pretty much only going to be encountered italicised or capitalised as a proper noun, so you're already clued in to expect some funky readings.

I've had lower level students come up to me with a cutesy English notebook with the chart printed on the back (Morning Glory is getting innovative here!) and then attempt to use it to decipher English phonics. I love their ingenuinty here, but naturally, it didn't work. Just be sure to stress to students that Romanisation != English.

jayrenegade · « **Reply #15 on:** March 16, 2015, 04:39:56 PM »

Today my CT and I made name tags with the fourth grade. We used the poster provided above, and all the students had a go a decoding their own names. After we had spoken about the anomalies like Kim, the students made their own name tags with their name written in both English and Korean. Just thought I would share. It filled half a period and they enjoyed it.

johnny russian · « **Reply #16 on:** March 27, 2015, 12:10:14 PM »

Quote from: dream_a_happy on March 06, 2015, 04:54:36 PM

A lot of my students still don't know how to write their names in English after studying the language for years, and the majority have no clue how to romanise things like Korean place names or foods, so I made this romanisation chart to stick up in the classroom. It prints on 4 B4 sheets (1 is top left, 2 is bottom left, 3 is top right etc).

The Korean on the second page explains how to write syllables, so their name can be written as Minsu, Min Su or Min-su, according to their preference. The Korean on the last page explains that this poster shows the current government accepted romanisation, but that many names don't stick to it (eg, Park instead of Bak, Kim instead of Gim).

In class, I explained that g/k means that it's a g at the start of a syllable and k at the end (so 국 becomes guk), but my low level students sometimes get confused with 영 and write ngyeong instead of yeong, so you might want to make sure they understand that one.

This poster isn't perfect. Romanisation can get a bit complicated, and I didn't want to bog the poster down with too much information. But I think this covers the basics. Hopefully it can be useful for some other teachers.

i like your chart, but just to let you know that's it not printing properly on my computer. huge sections of it are getting cut off. other people may have the same problem, so i would suggest exporting your chart as a PDF file.

EDIT: uploaded a pdf of the chart, this pdf prints fine for me

obscuremirage · « **Reply #17 on:** March 04, 2016, 12:51:54 PM »

Thanks to the original poster for making this and to the other person who made it into a pdf!

sapphirewind · « **Reply #18 on:** March 04, 2016, 04:43:46 PM »

Quote from: lianney on March 10, 2015, 05:04:01 PM

This gets tricky.

My Korean name is 윤희. It is romanized as Yunhui, but on my birth certificate (it is currently my middle name) it is Yoonhee, which sounds exactly how it is pronounced. This website would be Oeguk.com if it was according to the official romanization. I don't know how "어" became "eo". If I didn't know anything about Korea, I would pronounce "Jeonju" as "Jee-ohn ju". Just my little rant about romanization! I always recommend people to learn hangeul first before studying Korean and never use romanized letters!

I had the same difficulty when explaining the chart to one of my new co-teachers. Her name is 강동희 and spells the 희 "hee" as well. If we go by the supposed official romanization then it would be "Hui" and in the chart it looks like "Heui".... like the OP said, it isn't a perfect science...far from it.

oglop · « **Reply #19 on:** March 05, 2016, 01:14:25 AM »

i meet quite a few people who pronounce 'seoul' as 'see-uh-ool'. outside of korea, of course

Author Topic: Classroom Poster for Romanising Korean Names (Read 4149 times)

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