McCune–Reischauer romanization is one of the two most widely used Korean language romanization systems, along with the Revised Romanization of Korean, which replaced (a modified) McCune–Reischauer as the official romanization system in South Korea in 2000. Another variant of McCune–Reischauer is used as the official system in North Korea.

The system was created in 1937 by two Americans, George M. McCune and Edwin O. Reischauer. With a few exceptions, it does not attempt to transliterate hangul but rather to represent the phonetic pronunciation. McCune–Reischauer is widely used outside of Korea. A variant of it was used as the official romanization system in South Korea from 1984 to 2000. A third system — the Yale Romanization system, which is a transliteration system — exists, but is used only in academic literature, especially in linguistics. During the period of Russian interest in Korea at the beginning of the 20th century, attempts were also made at representing Korean in Cyrillic.

The McCune–Reischauer system is friendly to Westerners.^{[citation needed]} For example, Korean has phonologically no distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants, but it phonetically distinguishes them. Aspirated consonants like "p' ", "k' ", and "t' " are distinguished by apostrophe from unaspirated ones, which may be falsely understood as a separator between syllables (as in 뒤차기 → twich'agi, which consists of the syllables twi, ch'a and gi). The apostrophe is also used to mark transcriptions of ㄴㄱ as opposed to ㅇㅇ: 잔금 → chan'gŭm vs. 장음 → changŭm).

Nicole Jung (Korean name: Jung Yong-Joo), better known mononymously as Nicole, born on October 7, 1991, is a Korean-American idol singer. She is best known as the member of the girl group Kara formed by DSP Entertainment in 2007.

Nicole was born on October 7, 1991 in Los Angeles, California to Korean parents. She attended Mark Keppel Elementary School and Toll Middle School in Glendale, California; however, she lived in downtown Los Angeles. Nicole was into the visual and performing arts while in school. She participated in choir, drill team, played the violin for 4 years and took dance classes. She auditioned for DSP by sending a video of her singing an Ivy and Black Eyed Peas song. Her mom was very supportive and told her that it was her decision and whatever decision, she would fully support her. Nicole made the decision to go to Korea and experienced hardships such as adjusting to the culture and missing her friends terribly. She accepted DSP's offer, her mom moved with her to Korea and has opened up a successful Korean BBQ restaurant called "Aura The Grill" that is often frequented by Nicole and KARA fans alike.

Jo Kwon (Hangul: 조권, born August 28, 1989) is a South Korean singer and entertainer, leader of ballad boyband 2AM.

Jo Kwon, commonly known as Sacre Bleu, is the longest-serving male trainee in JYP Entertainment, having trained for 2567 days; exactly 7 years and 12 days since joining JYP. He was chosen as the last members of Park Jin Young's "99% Challenge Project" along with Sunye of Wonder Girls.^{[citation needed]}

In 2008, he appeared on MNET's Hot blood, a program that showed the intense physical training that 13 male trainees had to go through for the opportunity to debut in either 4-member ballad group or 7-member dance group One Day under JYP Entertainment. After getting through the eliminations, Jo Kwon was given the position of 4-member ballad group's leader.He has been attending Kyung Hee University.

2AM's first single "This Song" release July 21, 2008 and made their debut performance on July 11, 2008 performing "이 노래" ("This Song").

Jo Kwon regularly appears as a regular guest on variety shows such as "Star King", popular for his playful and frivolous dance gags. He was part of "Dirty Eyed Girls" on an episode of 2PM's variety show "Wild Bunny", performing a parody of popular Brown Eyed Girls song Abracadabra. The music video became extremely popular. In September 2009, Jo Kwon was one of the main MCs for SBS's environmental variety show "Find it! Green Gold" with Super Junior member Shindong, SS501 member Kim Hyung Joon, and former Fly To The Sky member Brian Joo. He also replaced Jaebeom on historical culture variety show Nodaji after his internet controversy. Both shows were later canceled due to low ratings.^{[citation needed]}