...Korean! Week One: Part One - Korean Alphabet

안녕하세요!

So for my first language that I've decided to learn, I've taken upon myself to teach myself Korean, or 한국어!

Upon wondering whether I should learn something that was related to a language that I already knew, like Portuguese or Catalan, or learn something completely unrelated, like Irish Gaelic, I decided to meet somewhere in the middle: Korean! It would be something that I do not have hardly exposure to (besides what I've heard from other people), and it is an Asian language, but something that is completely different from Japanese!



Korean is a member of the Koreanic language family, along with its only sister language, Jeju. It is spoken by approximately 48.4 million people in South Korea as of 2010, and over 77 million people throughout the world, mostly in North and South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia (Ethnologue, 2015).

So in this post I'll be exploring the introductory chapter to the textbook Integrated Korean, Beginning I.

In this introduction, the authors begin a bunch of dense information that I found, personally, would be much more useful if it were dispersed throughout the rest of the book, such as verb conjugations, parts of speech, among other information.

Instead, I'll start this blog first with how to read Korean. As many of you may already know, Korean has its own alphabet that is completely different from the Latin alphabet that we use or even from the kanji/kana that Japanese uses! This writing system is called 한글, or hangeul. Similar to (but in the same sense, different from) the Latin alphabet that we use for English, each of these symbols represents a distinct sound. Please be aware that the romanization presented in this blog will be the format that I myself have found the easiest to use and remember.

한글 consists of 19 consonants, 8 vowels, and 13 diphthongs (combinations of 2 vowel sounds).

The consonants are as follows:
ㄱ(k), ㅋ(k'),ㄲ(kk), ㄴ(n), ㄷ(t), ㅌ(t'), ㄸ(tt), ㄹ(r), ㅁ(m),
ㅂ(p), ㅍ(p'), ㅃ(pp), ㅅ(s), ㅆ(ss),ㅇ(ng), ㅈ(ch), ㅉ(jj), ㅊ(ch'), and ㅎ(h). 

For the most part, the consonants are pronounced exactly the same as their English counterparts. Of the consonants, there are 4 that have 3 types of variations: plain (p), aspirated (p'), and tense (pp); and each consonant has a 2-way contrast: plain (s), and tense (ss). The aspirated consonants are pronounced with a puff of air that is released from the mouth, while the tense can be described as requiring muscle tension upon release.

The vowels are:
ㅏ(a), ㅐ(ae), ㅓ(eo), ㅔ(e), ㅗ(o), ㅜ(u), ㅡ(eu), and ㅣ(i).  

(a) is pronounced like the a in father, (ae) like the a in care, (eo) like the a in awake, (e) like the e in met, (o) like the o in owner (without the w sound), (u) like the oo in boo (but shorter), (eu) like the u in put, and (i) like the ee in see.

The diphthongs are a combination of any vowel sound and either the semivowel y- or w-:
ㅑ(ya), ㅒ(yae), ㅕ(yeo), ㅛ(yo), ㅠ(yu), ㅖ(ye), ㅘ(wa), ㅙ(wae), 
ㅚ(we), ㅝ(weo), ㅞ(we), ㅟ(wi), and ㅢ(ui).

Both ㅚ and ㅞ are both pronounced indistinguishably as (we), although they used to be pronounced distinctly. The diphthong ㅢ (ui) is pronounced as either (eu) or (ui) at the beginning of a word, or as (i) after a consonant or in the middle of a word.

Below is a summarization of the sounds in Korean:

I hope this post has been a good introduction into Korean, insofar as learning how to read goes. I'll be posting practice writing worksheets for hangeul soon, as well as links to the audio for the pronunciation of Korean letters. Post a comment if you have any questions or want to leave feedback!