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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I've no data, but I've talked to a couple Westerners mention finding hangul very easy to learn, including 1 who managed to learn to read it (not fluently but competently) over a single weekend, despite having no exposure to non-Latin alphabet before. The complete lack of ambiguity in the mappings between letters and sounds lends itself to being pretty easy to learn. Hangul is generally taught as having 24 letters - 14 consonants and 10 vowels - which is less than the 26 in English, though in actuality there are more vowels due to combinations of vowels being their own things (e.g. "ㅏ" and "ㅣ" are 2 of the 10 vowels, but "ㅐ" is not, and it's NOT pronounced the same as if you just put "ㅏ" and "ㅣ" together). I think the fact that each "chunk" in hangul correlates exactly to 1 syllable might also help, because it makes for a natural mapping between the number of "chunks" you see on the page and the number of syllables you pronounce, versus English where those boundaries between syllables aren't obvious.