kengdic VS uniunihan-db

I began working on an algorithm to romanize Hangul, but I realized there are a lot of edge cases to cover, especially when the final consonant of one syllable flows into the initial consonant of the next syllable. My knowledge of Korean words is near zero, so to come up with words that match the edge cases, I downloaded a list of Korean words with about 130,000 entries from https://github.com/garfieldnate/kengdic.

I loved learning to read Japanese through the second volume of Heisig's _Learning the Kanji_. Volume 1, which teaches only meanings, is a slog, but volume 2, which teaches the Sino-Japanese readings is a beautiful example of organizing material to minimize entropy and maximize benefit for memorization as soon as possible. Unfortunately he never put together a volume 2 for a Chinese language. I haven't worked on it in a while, but I have a project where I attempt re-create the book for Japanese as well as Mandarin, Korean, and Vietnamese: https://nateglenn.com/uniunihan-db/ (repo: https://github.com/garfieldnate/uniunihan-db).

The "pure groups" are the ones where the presence of a specific radical guarantee you a specific pronunciation (within the list of character/pronunciation pairs you're trying to learn). Of the 4800 characters I used for the volume, only 290 are in the chapter on pure groups. The rest are either in semi-regular groups with varying numbers of exceptions, or in completely irregular groups with no discernible patterns.

The characters were designed continuously over a period of time starting thousands of years ago, and the phonetic parts were sometimes exact and sometimes just clues, similar sounds or rhymes to give the reader a hint. Ancient Chinese pronunciation has changed beyond recognition, so it makes perfect sense that the pronunciations wouldn't be regular anymore.

Mainland China uses a "simplified" character set, which did not affect literacy but in my opinion is a bit more difficult to read; they reduced the number of lines so that more characters look samey and they combined many (Mandarin) homonyms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#...), removing the meaning portion of characters that would have distinguished them. The simplification did not apply to all characters, so to achieve a high level of literacy you need to know traditional forms, anyway.

It would be interesting to see someone try to actually remodel hanzi from scratch for a specific dialect of Chinese, using 100% regular phonetic components and no variants; multiple pronunciations of a character in the current system would be required to be written differently. An interesting example of this would be certain Korean gukja, where they've combined a Chinese character with a phonetic hangeul (example: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%AB%87). This would be a truly simplified Chinese character set... but all of the culture's history that gets built into spelling over time would be completely lost, which is why I always prefer conservative spelling systems.