KOREAN ALPHABET BASICS – HOW TO READ HANGUL (PART 1-3)

 

KOREAN ALPHABET BASICS – HOW TO READ HANGUL (PART 1-3)

Korean is maybe one of the most difficult languages for an English speaking foreigner to learn, the first hurdle is the Korean / Hangul alphabet which is completely different from English. However it may at first look like a load of strange alien lines and circles to begin with, but in reality it’s quiet (not very) simple to learn. Just like in the English Alphabet the Korean has both Vowels and Consonants, and every complete symbol equals a single syllable. Therefore it is in time easy to learn the how to read Korean / Hangul with practice. This guide will show you the most basic way to read each character.
Firstly you have the 10 basic vowels which appear in every full Korean symbol. The table below shows how to read each in English.

Finally if you put the vowels and the consonants together you get this chart, which shows the complete Korean Alphabet.

“A” Korean Vowel Combinations

Firstly we will look at the 4 “A” sound vowels which are all quiet similar.

The first 2 symbols both have an “A” type sound, as in “at” or “end”. The second two symbols have a “Y+A” sound, such as in “yak” or “yes”. When listening to them spoken quickly it can be quiet difficult to tell which one or which, basically ᅢand ᅤ are spoken a little stronger.

 “W” Korean Vowel       Combinations

Next will be look at the 7 “W” sounding vowels, again a number of them are quiet similar.

The first two vowels (ᅪ & ᅯ) are pretty unique and don’t sound like any of the others. The next three (ᅫ, ᅰ & ᅬ) however are all similar and require the use of different tones. ᅫ sounds like the start of  “Wag”, ᅰ sounds like the start of “Wedding” and ᅬ sounds like the start of “Weight”. There are also ᅱwhich is the same as Wii as in the Nintendo Wii and also the ᅴ which has a double sound like in the word “Gooey”.

KOREAN ALPHABET BASICS – TENSED CONSONANTS, FINAL CONSONANTS, DOUBLE CONSONANTS (PART 3)

This is the final part of our Korean Alphabet Basics series, if you haven’t already please also check out “Part 1” & “Part 2”, so that you are up-to-date and ready to move forward with this part.

In this part we will look at Tensed Consonants, Final Consonants and also the Double Consonant aspects of the Hangul or Korean Alphabet. Firstly tensed consonants, there are 5 different tensed consonants, they are all very similar to normal consonants but they have a stronger sound. It’s similar to adding an exclamation point (!) on the end of the full Korean character.

A good example of a tensed consonant being used in a word is 빵 which sounds like “Bang!” in English. 빵 means bread in Korean, however without the use of a tensed consonant 방 sounds softer “bang” and means room in Korean. This shows that the use of a tensed consonant can change not only the sound but also the meaning of a word.

Now moving onto the Final Consonants, these come at the end of a Korean character and always after a vowel. Here is a list of the different final consonants and the sounds that they make:

As you can see there are 16 different final consonants but only 7 sounds as some sound the same. Here is a good example of why; take these to Korean words “빗” & “빚”, they sound exactly the same (Bit) however there meaning are different “빗” means Comb and “빚” means Debt. This is a similar to the words “Free” and “Three”, sound the same but have completely different meanings.

Finally we move onto the final aspect double consonants, which are less commonly seen in Korean writing but important to learn just in case you do come across a word which uses them. We used the “” Vowel as a base in this chart:

To explain with the black characters you read the first symbol and with the red characters you read the second symbol. As you can tell from this chart the double consonant is maybe the strangest and most difficult part of the Korean alphabet and aspect of reading Hangul. It takes practice and a good memory to learn them but if you practice it won’t take too long (hopefully).

The double consonant aspect completes this basic guide to reading the Korean Alphabet / Hangul; you should now be able to use what you have learnt in all 3 parts to be able to start reading Korean and so moving onto some basic vocabulary and more.  :)