--- Patrick Chew <patchew@...> wrote:

> suzmccarth wrote:
> > Is Thai taught as a syllabary - with a syllable
> > chart? This may sound a bit mechanistic, but in
> > the scripts that I am thinking of - Cree, Tamil,
> > Hangul, Amharic, the script is usually taught as a
> > syllabary. This is because the syllables have
> > become indivisible or opaque or not linearily
> > organized.
>
> IIRC, hangul isn't really taught as a
> syllabary...
> while there are charts and books that show the full
> syllabic range, due to the non-use of the majority
> of said syllables, it's relatively moot. The
> Korea-educated Koreans that I've asked have
> consistently said that they learned hangul
> alphabetically (kiyeok, nieun, tigeut, rieul,
> mieum....
> a, ya, eo, yeo, o, yo, u, yu, eu, i, ...) and then
> learned how to put them together to match semi-
> syllabic/-morphologic orthographic "norms"... which
> mimic syllabary styled teaching,
> eg. ka, kya, keo, kyeo, ko, kyo, etc...
> Hangul, is, however, divisable and transparent
> and linearly (in a square) organized...

I was taught hangul in Mexico and Guatemala by a
Korean
backpacker. She taught me the alphabet in order.
First the consonants and then the vowels. Then she
showed me how to arrange them into a square.
She made no mention of syllabaries and showed me no
syllable charts.
I learned it in 1 or 2 days but never learned much
vocabulary or spelling. It's only in the last year
that I've discovered just how tricky Korean spelling
is.

Andrew Dunbar.

> cheers,
> -patrick
>

http://en.wiktionary.org -- http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl

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