#hiiii sam I'M SORRY THIS IS SO COMPLICATED but I hope it's at least a little bit helpful

[yisanged]

okay this is a guide for reading romanized korean names I made specifically for the indoctrination of one of my tumblr mutuals as an orv enjoyer but it applies to all korean media. I tried my best to make this actually helpful but the way korean gets romanized is really inconsistent throughout different translations and it's honestly kind of. hell. and I'm also not great with ipa so I might be using it Not Right. I used this wikipedia article to help me though so it should be mostly solid. the format will be [most common romanizations] -> [ipa (example pronunciation)]. examples are american english cause that's what I know... sorry guys. I did my best to cover my bases so I hope this helps a little 😔 also all of this is under the assumption that you aren't striving for native-level pronunciation mastery so I'm gonna give shortcuts and not go into specific details

the source for all of this besides the wikipedia article is korean is technically my first language and I'm told my pronunciation is pretty good. that being said I've grown up in the us of a and have come to be more comfortable speaking english, having never received a formal education in korean, so if anyone wants to correct me. feel free

vowels:

a -> ɐ (spa)

o -> o (sword)

eo/u* -> ʌ (up) -- in the context of this vowel being sandwiched between y (j) and ng (ŋ) it might be spelled young instead of yung or yeong as usual

oo/u* -> u (rude)

ee/i -> i (free but keep it short)

eu -> ɯ (foot)

+ diphthongs

e -> e (rate)

ae -> ɛ (bet)

the above two sound really similar and aren't really distinguished much in terms of pronunciation in modern korean so. nbd

there are others like ui and w/e but I'm gonna skip ipa for those for now because a) these are sounds that just don't come up in english like at all so knowing the ipa probably won't help you and b) the ipa listed in the article really only applies when the diphthongs are being pronounced by themselves and they sound different in different contexts anyways which is usually how they show up so. there's not much point.**

I won't go over all the consonants, since they're mostly self-explanatory, so here's just the ones to note:

g -> g (gust, as opposed to just)

l -> l (pronounced like left)

the korean hangul character used is the same, but if it's at the beginning of the syllable it's usually romanized r -> ɾ (better; alveolar tap)

so roksoo is pronounced ɾok'su with an alveolar tap like the spanish r, not l like in left or r like in run. a note for names with "il" like gilyoung or pildu is that it's probably kind of awkward to pronounce the proper i sound and then the l so it's acceptable to shorten the i to rhyme with "pill" in english. I honestly think it's better that way than trying to make it fit by lengthening the i so that it sounds like "eel" like the animal.

doubled up consonants like in -ssi are just tensed, so like s͈. but the difference between tensed and untensed is subtle and really hard to get so don't worry about it too much. also a note that if s precedes i then it's usually pronounced (and often romanized) sh -> ɕ (sheep). that applies to "-ssi" as well so it's pronounced like sheen anyways without the tensed ss really coming through much

*yeah, "u" gets used to romanize two entirely different sounds. yeah, it gets really confusing. I'm sorry to say that I don't have much practical advice to offer you in knowing which one it is other than figuring out how a particular translation is doing it by looking for the absence/presence of one or the other. unfortunately, like i mentioned at the beginning, inconsistency is rampant in these things and so even that doesn't always work out. the orv tl that I read used sooyoung but also pildu, with "oo" and "u" respectively being the same sound. some people will even use them together within a single name like yoo (juː) joonghyuk (tɕuŋ'hjʌk) becoming yu junghyuk or even yu joonghyuk or whatever in which case. I'm so sorry ***

** I'm not just gonna throw you into the deep end though dw. when preceded by a consonant, how you'll most likely see it in names, ui -> i (free). for example, jung huiwon is spelled like that bc those are the hangul characters used but everyone pronounces it hiː. this'll often just be romanized as hee as well. the "won" in heewon is also a diphthong- it manifests as won but does not involve the o sound at all and is pronounced like wʌn. "oi" is another common one, as in the last name choi. likewise, when preceded by a consonant oi -> something like ɛ (bet). so, choi would be tʃɛ as opposed to tʃɔɪ.

while we're on the topic of weird last names. lee is the most common romanization for a very common korean last name (my last name, actually :o) that's actually just pronounced iː (feel). It's sometimes romanized as yi to reflect this, but I don't think I've ever seen it as i or ee. From experience, if that's how it's spelled, you won't ever get corrected for saying lee with the l, but just for the record that it's technically not the proper pronunciation.

***really the only way to work this out is getting familiar enough with korean names (most of which are pretty formulaic) to register what sounds are likely to appear in a name (du is possible, but dʌ isn't really; jʌ isn't a real korean last name i don't think). either that or leaning to read hangul and looking at the names in the original korean to figure it out. but neither of those are very practical solutions for casual enjoyers. sorry. another issue is figuring out how the syllables are partitioned. most korean names are two syllables. hangul has a really particular way of organizing syllables that doesn't really come through in english; some translators will opt to hyphenate names like kim rok-soo but not all do. the syllables are pretty obvious with some names, but others like sookyung (it's soo-kyung, as opposed to sook-young) are a bit harder. the only good reliable solutions for this are the two I mentioned earlier which again. are more complicated than you'd probably like. if you are willing though it isn't that hard to learn hangul at all it's considered a very logical and easy writing system

like I've said inconsistency is gonna be your biggest enemy in this kinda stuff. I am being a bit dramatic and it won't affect you that much if you stick to reading a single translation for one particular media but. I want to complain about this. it's so bad. btw localization is also a thing that happens sometimes, mostly for fantasy-type stories where the author had "foreign" sounding names in mind when they were writing them. for example cale henituse from trash of the count's family would be more like kaeil henituseu if the name was romanized instead of localized. this is also a source of contention ngl like cale obviously being the preferred tl, but alberu (the romanization(?) for a character in tcf) being generally used more often over the official localization alver

but anyways I know this is all really complicated but I'm glad you're getting into this kind of stuff I hope you like it and I hope this helped somewhat :] happy reading