Write me four sentences of Korean to greet my Korean viewers with, and respell them in ordinary English letters so that I — who cannot read Hangul and have never heard the sounds — can say them out loud and be understood. Not IPA, not Revised Romanisation: what an English mouth has to see. Then I read it into Google Translate's microphone on camera and we all find out together.
I present a YouTube channel in English. I want to open my next video by greeting my Korean viewers in Korean, out loud, in my own voice — and I do not speak a word of Korean. I cannot read Hangul. I have never heard most of these sounds.
What I can do is read English. That is the entire tool you have to work with: you write something in English letters, I say it into a microphone, and a Korean listener either understands me or does not.
Four sentences, in this order and in this order only, so I can learn them one at a time:
Keep each sentence short. I have to say this from memory on camera.
Respell it for an English mouth, not for a romanisation standard. Do not give me Revised Romanisation, McCune–Reischauer, Yale or IPA. eo, eu, ae, ŭ, ŏ, ʌ, ɯ are not instructions — I will read them as English and produce the wrong sound with total confidence. Write the syllables the way an English speaker would have to see them in order to say them: uh, oo, eh, ee, ah. If your respelling would survive being read aloud by someone who has never heard of Korea, it is right.
Respell the sound, not the spelling. Korean is not pronounced the way it is written. Where the written form and the spoken form come apart, follow the spoken form every time — I am reading this to be heard, not to be transcribed back into Hangul. Getting this wrong is the single most likely way this whole thing fails, because the wrong answer looks completely reasonable on the page.
Break every syllable with a hyphen and keep the syllables even. Tell me if I should resist the English habit of hammering one syllable harder than the others.
Warn me about the sounds English does not have. Not a linguistics lecture — tell me what to do with my mouth. "Like the u in pull, but with your lips relaxed instead of rounded" is useful. "Close-back unrounded vowel" is not.
Pick the sayable version. If a nicer sentence needs a sound I would need three weeks to learn, write the plainer sentence that I can actually land. Say so if you made that trade.
Get the politeness level right. This is a stranger speaking to an audience of strangers on the internet. If you pitch it at the wrong level, a native speaker hears it instantly and it is the most embarrassing possible way to fail this.
You should know exactly what is about to happen to your answer, because it changes what a good answer is.
I am going to paste your Hangul into Google Translate to check it means what you told me it means. Then I am going to read your respelling aloud into Google Translate's Korean voice input and see what it thinks I said. What comes back out gets compared, on camera, to the Hangul you started from.
So this is not scored on how correct your romanisation is by any standard. It is scored on whether a machine that has never met me can recover your sentence from my English-speaker mouth reading your English letters.
Raw JSON, nothing else — no markdown fence, no preamble, no commentary afterwards. Exactly this shape:
{
"sentences": [
{
"hangul": "...",
"say": "...",
"meaning": "...",
"watch_out": ""
}
],
"read_aloud": "...",
"register": "...",
"hard_sounds": [
{ "sound": "...", "what_to_do": "..." }
]
}
say — the respelling, syllables hyphenated.meaning — a literal English gloss of that sentence, so I can check it against Google Translate.watch_out — only where this sentence has a trap in it. "" otherwise; do not pad.read_aloud — all four sentences as one continuous block of respelling, with / between sentences. This is the field I will actually read off the screen, so it has to stand alone.register — one sentence: what politeness level you chose, and why it is the right one for a stranger addressing an audience.hard_sounds — at most five. The sounds most likely to make me unintelligible, and what to do with my mouth.Sorted by cost. Open a row to load its answer.