Almost as though it's a whole different language or something, Korean insists on having its own alphabetical order. Sure, it doesn't have many of the sounds represented by letters in the Roman alphabet, but did they have to make their alphabetical order so hard to memorize? (To be fair, English requires you to learn an entire song to remember its alphabetical order.)
ㄱ ㄲ ㄴ ㄷ ㄸ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅃ ㅅ ㅆ ㅇ ㅈ ㅉ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎ
In the transliteration scheme I use, this is basically k (or g), kk, n, d (or t), tt, r, m, b (or p), pp, s, ss, Ø, j, jj, ch, k', t', p', h.
(This is just for initial consonants, not vowels or final consonants. And I don't even understand what it means that there's an alphabetical order for final consonants. And North Korea has its own alphabetical orders! Well, sure. They would. And everything is further complicated by the fact that those letters don't map cleanly onto letters in the English alphabet. It's all kind of... approximate.)
I've seen mnemonics for remembering Korean alphabetical order before, but they don't work for me. My textbook offers this: "Canada lamps are Jackie Churchill and Katie Thomas's parents' hobby." To me, that's about as hard as remembering the string of consonants. (Canada lamps? Jackie Churchill? Katie Thomas?)
Here are the ones I came up with:
Condor mobs just chase kittens to pink heaven.
Canada rumbles—jerks choose kids to put here.
Gandalf rumbas with joy. Champions come to pinch him.
With these, and my textbook's "Canada lamps," the "doubled" consonants are understood to follow the single forms. So, where the order starts with ㄱ ㄲ ㄴ ㄷ ㄸ, the mnemonic starts with one k sound, an n sound, then one d sound. You also have to remember that the aspirated stops—ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ (k', t', p')—come at the end. Oh. And these don't account for the ㅇ/ Ø. I told you: it's hard.
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