Korean Translator

Korean is written in Hangul, an alphabet designed in the fifteenth century to be learnable in a morning — letters are grouped into square syllable blocks, so 한국 is two blocks, not two characters. Translations here include a Latin romanisation, which is what you want if you are trying to say something rather than read it.

The part machine translation handles worst is speech level. Korean encodes the relationship between speaker and listener in the verb ending itself, and there are several — the polite -요 ending you would use with a stranger, the formal -습니다 of announcements and news, and the plain form used with close friends. A translator will give you one of these without mentioning that it made a social choice on your behalf.

Word order is subject-object-verb, so the verb lands at the end of the sentence, and subjects are dropped freely when context makes them obvious. Short Korean sentences therefore carry more implied meaning than their English translations suggest.