Busan or Pusan? Korean romanization explained

Gimpo and Kimpo. Busan and Pusan. Jeju and Cheju. They are the same words, written under two different systems, and knowing which is which saves a lot of confusion.

If you have looked up more than a few Korean words you have already hit this. One source writes Busan, another writes Pusan. A menu says bulgogi, an older cookbook says pulgogi. Neither is a typo.

Two systems, one language

From 1937 onward, most English writing about Korean used McCune–Reischauer, a system built by two scholars to capture how Korean sounds to an English ear. It uses apostrophes and breve marks to make distinctions: k versus k', o versus ŏ.

In 2000 the South Korean government adopted Revised Romanization, designed to be typed on an ordinary keyboard and to map cleanly back onto Hangul spelling. It dropped the apostrophes and the breves. That is the switch that turned Pusan into Busan.

This site uses Revised Romanization, which is also what road signs, government documents and most modern textbooks use. The main exception you will see everywhere is personal names: people spell their own names however they like, which is why you meet a Lee, a Yi and a Rhee who all write their surname 이.

Where romanization quietly lies to you

Both systems are approximations, and a few gaps matter enough to name.

The 어 / 오 pair. Revised writes these as eo and o, which suggests the first one has an e sound in it. It does not. 어 is a single vowel, closer to the vowel in son, and reading eo as two sounds is one of the most audible learner mistakes.

The tense consonants. 진짜? (jinjja?) is written jinjja, and that double j is doing real work — it is a completely different consonant, not an emphatic version of the single one. Romanization can show you that something is different. It cannot show you what to do with your throat.

Sound changes across syllables. Korean spelling keeps the letters and lets the pronunciation shift. 좋아해 is written with a ㅎ that you barely hear, and comes out as joahae. 같이 is spelled with ㅌ and pronounced gachi. Romanization records the result, so the connection back to the spelling disappears — which is precisely why it stops being useful once you can read.

• ▶
  좋아해

  joahae

  I like you — the ㅎ almost vanishes
• ▶
  같이 가자

  gachi gaja

  let us go together — ㅌ plus 이 becomes a ch sound

The honest advice

Use romanization as a crutch for your first week and then throw it away. Hangul takes an afternoon — it was deliberately built to be learnable in a sitting — and every hour you spend reading Korean through English letters is an hour spent learning a spelling system that nobody in Korea uses.

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