While learning Korean grammar and vocabulary can be a difficult task, it’s an incredibly simple language to learn to read. A lot of people think that Korean has thousands of characters, like Chinese, but in fact it’s a simple, logical alphabet made up of only 24 letters. In this post, I’ll explain a little bit about the Korean alphabet, teach some of the basics, and by the end of this post, you’ll be able to read a little Korean.

A primary goal of our 1-year trip to Asia was to learn to speak another language. After very little debate, we decided on Korean. Sharon’s 75% Korean and doesn’t speak the language while her parents both do, so it was a pretty easy decision.

Lesson 1 - Some Basics

Just like in the English language, Korean letters are split by consonants and vowels.  Each Korean character consists of two, three or four letters, clumped together to create a box-like character.

Here’s some Korean if you’ve never seen it before:

안녕하세요

The word means “hello”. The word is made up of 5 characters- here’s the first character:

안

However, this character is simply made up of 3 letters:

ㅇ ㅏ ㄴ

The first letter, “ㅇ” is silent (when it is placed at the beginning of the character), the second, “ㅏ” is pronounced “ah”, as in father. The last letter, “ㄴ” is pronounced with an “n” sound. So this, “안” is “ahn”.

The thing I love about Korean is how consistent it is. Now that you know “ㅏ” is an “ah” sound, you can pronounce that letter in every word. For example, the 3^rd character in “안녕하세요” is:

하

It’s made up of two letters:

ㅎ   ㅏ

The first character, “ㅎ” is an “h” sound and we already know the second character, “ㅏ” is an “ah” sound. So, “하” is “hah”.

Lesson 2 - The Letters

So, now that you’ve got the basics, here are 6 of the Korean vowels:

I’m going to add 4 additional vowels to that set. If there are 2 small lines coming off of a letter, instead of just 1, you add a “y” sound.

Finally, here’s a subset of the consonants. This isn’t all of them, there are a few missing.

Lesson 3 - Pronouncing Hello

Let’s finish up pronouncing “hello” in Korean, here it is again:

안녕하세요

First character: 안
ㅇ- silent
ㅏ- “ah”
ㄴ- “n”

Second character: 녕
ㄴ- “n”
ㅕ- “yahw”
ㅇ- “ng” (not silent, because it’s the last letter)

Third character: 하
ㅎ- “h”
ㅏ- “ah”

Fourth character: 세
ㅅ- “s”
ㅔ- I didn’t introduce this vowel, but it’s pronounced “eh” as in “set”

Fifth character: 요
ㅇ- silent
ㅛ- “yo”

The Test

So why bother to learn to read if you can’t understand what you’re reading?

The answer, in Korean, many words are simply English words that are spelled out phonetically using Korean characters. Here’s your test and some examples. All of these are real “Korean” words:

바나나

뉴스

히터

주스

버스

Image credit: Pragmagraphr

Filed under: Travel: South Korea