FatManSeoul

Romanization

With apologies to Dr. Suess:

Do you have trouble pronouncing Korean?

It’s really quite easy for me!

I just look in the mirror to see what I say

And then I just say what I see.

Fatman wants you to be able to to be able to accurately understand, read, and say the names of Korean dishes – even if you don’t speak Korean. Of course it would be wonderful if we all learned hangeul, but that’s not realistic for everybody. In FatManSeoul, most of the time we’ll write the names of Korean foods and ingredients in both 한글 and romanize them (and put an English description in parenthesis, if needed).

We’ll be using the Revised Romanization of Korean (RR) when we do this. Frankly, the Fatman is lazy and hates putting in all the diacritics, breves, and apostrophes while typing, so McCune-Reischauer was out (sorry to all the professors and academics), and the only people who use Yale are linguists (sorry, linguists!) Because the romanization is consistent, you should usually be able to figure out the Korean letters from the English version most of the time, and be able to pronounce the word similarly to a native Korean speaker.

Usually on our pages you’ll see something like this: 불고기 / bulgogi (grilled meat, usually beef. literally “fire meat”)

Sometimes, when an older romanization is more recognizable, you’ll see the old one, with the new romanization in paranthesis if we’re not being slapdash: 깁치 / kimchi (gimchi)

Names will be romanized however the heck the person wants, or is usually credited in public. So, even if 신하균 should be Sin Hagyun, we’re quite happy to call him Shin Ha-kyun. Same goes for names of stores and restaurants.

So, with no further ado, here’s how to read and say what you see:

New Romanization System (Simplified Table)

For further information on romanization of Korean, click here.

When we write in Korean, also, we will follow the recommended guidelines for rendering foreign words into 한글, as well as including the original word in English and it’s native alphabet (when applicable and feasible.)

Japanese words will be romanized according to the Hepburn system. Sugoi desu ne? すごい！

Chinese will be romanized with great pain, difficulty, sweat, tears, and blood using the Hanyu-Pinyin system, unless we go to Taiwan and decide to try our hand at Tongyong-Pinyin. We hope we don’t have to do anything like that anytime soon. Everything else will be made up as we go along.

Happy eating!