Hangul Lessons

Getting Started on Korean Hangul!

Have you ever tried to learn another script? Anything you see in different script looks complicated, strange and difficult to understand. But Hangul pronounced and romanized as Han-geul (한글) is one of the simplest script all over the world. It is also one of the most logical and systematic language systems around the world. Hangul is the script used in Korean language. It is the 11^th most spoken language in the world and the native language of about 70 million people on Korean peninsula. As the inventor King Sejong the Great once said,

“Being of foreign origin, Chinese characters are incapable of capturing uniquely Korean meanings. Therefore, many common people have no way to express their thoughts and feelings. Out of my sympathy for their difficulties, I have created a set of 28 letters. The letters are very easy to learn, and it is my fervent hope that they improve the quality of life of all people.”

Indeed, Hangul took supremacy in Korean peninsula. However, Hangul in modern era has 40 letters. After many revisions made in earlier times, “Hangeul” in Romanized form is more developed. Nowadays, Hangul were taught in many countries around the world which proven the Korean influence.

Brief History of Hangul

Korean was written entirely using Chinese characters (called Hanja in Korean) up until 15^th century as they were once invaded by the Chinese empire. Since it required learning several thousand of complicated characters, only those with lots of money and time for education were literate. Only few aristocrats also were able to read and write fluently.

Year 1446 during the era of Sejong the Great, the fourth king of Joseon Dynasty, published the Hunminjeongeum Eonhae. It was the document that described the new alphabet system (Hangeul) which was specifically designed to be learned easily by many Korean people either wealthy or poor and most especially among his soldiers.

Photo Credit: http://www.cha.go.kr

However, even Hangul was so successful in spreading literacy to both women and undereducated people; some scholars and elites opposed to it and was considered as a threat to their special status and insisted that Chinese characters were the only legitimate writing system.

Since Hangul was very successful on long era, Tyrant King Yeonsan-gun banned it after commoners made Hangul posters that mocked him. But after his death, Hangul had made a comeback which often mixed with some Chinese characters.

Hangul was once again banned by Japanese during their invasion right before the beginning of World War II in an attempt to make Japanese their official language. But as soon as the war ended, Hangul became again the official writing system. Like before, it was often mixed with the Chinese characters until the 1980’s in which Hanja was mostly disappeared in South Korea except in scholarly documents. At present, Hangul reigns supreme.

Let’s Learn Hangul!

Hangul has 40 letters, 19 consonants and 21 vowels. They are written in Blocks that represents a syllable in English and contains between 2 to maximum of 4 letters. For example,

이     시     한   없

Remember these NOTES coz this will help you throughout the entire lesson we will going to take:

o   There is a rule that the first letter in each block must be a consonant.

o   Patchim is what we called to the consonants of a block which behaves differently from an initial consonant. It is always position below the vowel.

o   This letter ‘ o ’ must placed at first or in the beginning if you will write a block that starts  with a vowel. This is called as special silent placeholder since it will not create a sound. Like this example,

이   romanized as i pronounced as ‘ee’ in English word “meet”

어   romanized as eo pronounced as ‘o’ in in English word “son”

But when placed as patchim (받침), it will create a sound  ‘ng’ like for this example,

공 gong.

o   There is another rule that the second letter in each block must be a vowel.

o   Korean people often contract words. For an instance,

얘기(yaegi) talk, story  (contracted form of 이야기 (iyagi)

비번 (bibeon) password (contracted from 비밀번호 (bimilboenho))