# Like a fool



## HD148478

Hi everyone,

Here's my question:

As I use K-POP to sing along and practice pronunciation, I realized something;
In two different songs, the translation says "Like a fool"
In one of them the romanization is "Pado chorom", and the other is "Babo chorom".

Which one is correct?

Thank you.


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## 경상남도로 오이소

Babo chorom (바보처럼) is the right one.


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## HD148478

Thank you very much =)


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## Warp3

Technically, neither is right.  ㅓ sounds nothing like "o" and I've never seen a romanization system use that mapping.  The first word will either romanize to "babo" or "pabo" (depending on the romanization system).  The second word will romanize to "churum", "chuhruhm", "jeoreom" or many other variants (depending on the romanization system).

Using the Revised Romanization system (which is what South Korea officially switched to several years back), it would be romanized as: "babo jeoreom"

Personally, I would recommend moving away from romanizations as quickly as possible anyway, especially if you are trying to use them for pronunciation.  Korean pronunciation is virtually impossible to represent accurately by romanization due to both sound-shifts (characters that sound different based on neighboring characters) and the fact that Korean has sounds that simply don't have direct English equivalents.  In my honest opinion, it is much better to learn how to pronounce the Hangul characters as unique sounds that don't necessary have English equivalent sounds (some do match up to existing English sounds, but many don't).  Yes, romanizations are much easier to read when you are new to Korean, but they will lead to bad pronunciation down the line that is much harder to fix than learning it correctly from the start.


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## wildsunflower

For another example, "ㅂ" is not the same as "p" or "b". it's more like something between "p" and "b". I support Warp3's opinion. Once bad pronunciation becomes habitual, it is difficult to correct it later.


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## HD148478

wildsunflower said:


> For another example, "ㅂ" is not the same as "p" or "b". *it's more like something between "p" and "b".* I support Warp3's opinion. Once bad pronunciation becomes habitual, it is difficult to correct it later.



Ok I just thought I was going crazy or something because I couldn't figure out what the frack was the singer articulating there.

Thanks to both of you for your advice.

Regards.


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