Aigoo Lyrics
Aigoo Lyrics was my lyrics website that I created back in high school (10+ years ago). After teaching myself how to read/write Korean, I needed to practice, and I did so by romanizing songs. First, I romanized lyrics for songs that I wanted to sing myself. After I felt confident enough in my reading ability, I started a request thread on Soompi. I take pride in my lyrics as I romanize them for the purpose of singing: I check the lyrics with the song and add even add adlibs where I can catch them :D.
After a while, I had romanized enough lyrics that a friend (Olli!) offered me webhosting, and I soon created Aigoo Lyrics. From then, I recruited other kind souls and created a lyrics team (Korean translators, Chinese romanizers/translators, and Japanese romanizers/translators). I reserved the sole Korean lyrics romanizer for myself (:P), as I have very specific ways of romanizing lyrics, which you can read about in the next section.
Additionally, I had friends who helped me with setting up the website (Tim!) and forum moderators, as well as graphic designers. In preparing HUAYDAY for launch, I talked to a friend (Terezu!) and she inspired me to dig up my old lyrics (a 915-page .rtf document) and add them to my site.
It’s been over a decade since, but it remains a creation that I was proud of. Thank you so much to the Aigoo Lyrics Team** for all the hard work you all put in! :) (Can you imagine if we all'd kept it up? :O)
(** Angel, Anna, Crystal, Elaine, Jennifer, Jenny, Nana, Quynh)
How to Read Lyrics:
ex 1 vs ex 2?
I romanize Korean lyrics in two different ways, which I never really tried to name anything better than “ex 1” and “ex 2”.
Consider the following random lyrics:
사소한 변화들에 행복해져
EX 1: sasohan byonhwadure hengboghejyo
Previously (e.g., 2002) I listened to a lot of Japanese music, so ex 1 was my go-to. One of the first lyrics sites I found with lyrics I could follow was warghalv (by Marta!). This method of romanizations may not be as accurate for Korean pronunciation, but it might be easier to read when you first start trying to sing in Korean (e.g., if you’re used to Japanese romaji). To explain shortly, consonants/vowels are approximated to English consonants/Japanese or Spanish vowels.
EX 2: sah soh hahn byuhn hwah deul eh haeng bohk hae jyuh
Now, ex 2 is my go-to style of romanizing, because it more accurately attempts to capture the Korean sounds (tense vowels: ss, dd, kk, etc.); distinguishes between ㅗ/ㅓ and ㅜ/ㅡ, etc.). (That’s why I list it first if I have both styles for one song.)
I was honestly resistant to this style of romanization initially, because no one did it uniformly. Some people put h’s at the end, others don’t. Some people write “eh” or “ae” (e.g., sarang heh); some people write “eo” for “uh”. Some people stick the words together (e.g., sasohahn byeonhwadeuleh haengbokhaejyeo… x_x I’m dying.) But I grasped the parts of romanizing each character more accurately and made it my own(ish??).
(NOTE: Some of my consistent rule-breakers:
요 is always “yo” (not “yoh)
사랑 is always “sarang” one word (as opposed to “sah rang”… because I don’t want to break love *-*)
피 is pi (because I’m immature and don’t want “pee” in my lyrics XDdd))
other features
Talking/narration is written in italics!
English lyrics (when in stanzas that mix with Korean/Chinese) are CAPITALIZED, so as not to pronounce English as Korean
~ refers to a run, when the note is sung with a squiggly feel :P. Length is indicated by multiple squigglies ~~~~
.. <— this is tricky. I don’t know how I ended up doing this, but two dots (..) refers to a long held note. Longer notes will be indicated by dots in multiples of twos.
… <— Here there are three dots. This is used to indicate not necessarily a held note, but a trailing off note.