Korean writing system

From Wikiversity

[edit] Basic guide to Korean writing system

Relax, reading Korean isn't as hard as it might seem. When most people think of an asian language they think of this-

電點縣剎隻喘亞朱踹嗲案瘥雞

No. Korean isn't like that. It has a simple alphabet that one can learn in about a week. Maybe even around a day or two.(I did) Don't worry. There are chinese characters in Korean, but they are not required to know unless you are going to read newspapers or read other difficult things. If you only know the Korean writing system, you will be fine.

ㅁ- This is 'm'

ㅏ - This is 'a' as in ah (the sound your dentist asks you to make)

ㅗ - This is 'o' as in oats

You might be thinking, ok this isn't bad. Well there is a little more to Korean than that. It is really quite interesting, and makes this language unique. Let's say you wanted to now write 'mam' (would sound like mom) in Korean. I am sorry to say that it is not 'ㅁㅏㅁ'. It would be '맘'. Korean , in a way, stacks up its letters to create a character. There are 3 ways to stack up the letters to make a character:

It may seem confusing at first but it is really quite simple.

You might have noticed that there at least needs to be two letters together to make one character. Letters by themselves have really no meaning.

Way 1 is used if the vowel in the character is ㅓ ㅏ ㅣ ㅕ ㅑ ㅐ or ㅔ. As you can see all these vowels go up to down. The reason they are not used in way 2 is because they would not fit. Vowels always go in box2 in ways 1 and 2. (Way 3 is a special way- I will explain later) Way 2 is used when the vowel in the character is ㅗ ㅜ ㅠ ㅛ or ㅡ. As you can see all these letters are from left to right. These are used in way 2 because once again, it would not fit in way 1.