[mortallywounded]

As someone that is self taught and fairly good at Korean-- I agree. Using romanization of any kind is a nightmare in Korean. The only way to really grasp the language is to be able to read Hangul as soon as possible.

Using romanization is a lot worse than in a language like Japanese. In Japanese the romanization somewhat maps well to Japanese. In Korean, the various romanization methods are horrendous and don't come close to Korean at all.

Not only that-- many grammar forms require understanding the Hangul vowels to understand how to conjugate them. If you're using romanization they don't exist.

Even worse, Korean sound change rules make it hard to read Hangul without a lot of practice. If you're using romanization you're completely doomed.