한글 (Hangul)

One thing often leads to another when you're looking stuff up on the computer all day, and while doing a spot of research on Will Rogers (I had legitimate work-related reasons) I ended up looking at Hangul, the Korean alphabet.

I like the look of Korean. I think it's a very aesthetically pleasing language, on paper. Spoken Korean doesn't strike me as being particularly interesting (at least, not more so than Japanese), but the written language just looks good, if you know what I mean?

It's like the language version of a McLaren sports car - sure, it's not practical for day-to-day driving, but something in me still wants to take it for a spin. I think it's something to do with the lines - it just seems so neatly designed. I think it would look perfectly at home on the dashboard of a space ship.

This, for example, is "Hello" (or something to that effect):

안녕하세요

And this is "traveller":

여행자

Doesn't it just look like it should be etched in stone by glowing magic, or scrolling across the screen on a robot's face?

It sounds silly, but if I were to learn an Asian language, I'd have a hard time trying to pick one just because Korean looks so darn pretty.

In the grand scheme of things, Standard Chinese would probably be far more practical. Higher numbers of speakers, more places where you might encounter it, that sort of thing. Korean is only spoken in two countries - and, let's face it, one of those countries isn't high on the "likely to visit" list.

Heck, there's no guarantee we'll even have a "North Korea" for much longer if things keep going the way they currently are. Even if they don't provoke China into squashing them just to make sure unpleasant explosives aren't exchanged so close to home, there's a very good chance that the entire country will fall into a heap as a result of poor management. I'm willing to admit that I'm not an expert on how to run a country, but it seems to me that neither are the people currently in charge of North Korea.

I have the same issue with the idea of learning Japanese. That language is useful in exactly one country. I'm already learning one of those (theoretically - I have to admit that my Estonian studies have slipped a lot lately), and there's a limit to how much brain space I can give over to languages with limited applications.

One of the reasons why I chose German to study was because it is an official language in several countries, and it's central position means more countries to both the east and west of the German-speaking lands are likely to be familiar with it.

So, for practical purposes, I should be learning something with a lot of take up in other countries, like Mandarin or Cantonese...

...But Korean is so pretty.