Sweet Seoul Music: A Brief Introduction to 한글

One of the first things that any traveler will notice when he/she goes abroad is the language difference. And nothing screams as mightily at you that your not at home anymore as the signage you see as you creep across the landscape. This is especially true in Asia where, unless you've had any schooling in such things, as soon as you step out of the airport, you become illiterate--something which is both exciting and rather disabling at the same time.
Hangul, as you might know, is the writing system of Korea and Koreans are quite proud of it. I've heard it described as "the most scientific" of all writing systems and I have a book before me in which one German linguist describes it as "the world's greatest writing system". While I don't know about that, I will admit that it is much easier to learn than the Japanese writing system, which actually is made up of three different writing systems: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. In fact, the three writing systems of Japan can all show up in one sentence making any attempt to learn to read over there quite the undertaking. Korea, on the other hand, uses one writing system and one that seems to make sense.
Hangul's invention is usually credited to King Sejong, although there is some debate as to whether he himself invented it or rather oversaw a group of linguistic scholars who did the work. Either way it was the 1440s and only a handful of high ranking men in Korea could read. The writing system of the day was the Chinese system which used (and still uses) characters that are quite complex and represent symbols instead of sounds. Much of the upper class could read and felt it a privilege and right because of their place on the social ladder.
But King Sejong came along and decided that his country would be better off if everyone could read. Men, women, children. The privileged, the underprivileged. The old, the young. The tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free-or at least yearning to read the sign on the new business down the street. And so the king and his people set about to create a new script which would be easy to learn, easy to remember, and based on some sort of logic. And a few years later, 한글 was born.
Hangul is a phonetic script meaning the symbols represent sounds. The above mentioned Katakana and Hiragana are both phonetic scripts as are the Cyrillic (used mainly in eastern Europe), Arabic, and Latin scripts--though I imagine there are quite a number of people who would argue against the latter being completely phonetic; compare the different sounds of the "ch" in words like "chair", "chef" and "chord" or consider the same sound being represented by "f" (fig), "ph" (phone) and "gh" (cough) and you can see that our written symbols aren't exactly perfect for representing the sounds we make in English. But Hangul is truly a phonetic language because each symbol has one, and only one, sound, making it rather easy to learn.
At first glance to us westerners the Korean script looks much like the undecipherable madness that is Kanji. But upon closer examination it is actually nothing like the Chinese system and with a little training is quite easy to learn. It is made up of 14 consonants and 10 vowels, meaning it actually has fewer characters than the 26 that make up the Latin alphabet. But whereas in English we put one letter and then another letter and then another so that each letter essentially stands alone, Hangul combines the characters to form more complex symbols that represent syllables (from here on out I will try to refer to the individual components as characters and the combination of these characters as symbols).

한글

Take the name of the script, for instance. 한글 is made up of two symbols: 한 (han) and 글 (gul). If you look closely at "han" symbol, you should be able to make out three separate characters:ㅎ, ㅏ, and ㄴ . The first is the "h" sound, the second is the vowel sound "ah" (as in "on"), and the last is the "n". Reading from the top left towards the right and then down, you can now read the symbol. Now look closely at the "gul" symbol, and you'll again see three characters only this time they are stacked one on top of another: ㄱ, ㅡ, and ㄹ. Here we have, in order, the "g" (hard "g" as in "girl"), the "u" (as in "bull" or very close to it), and the "l". Now you just put this all together and read ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ or 한글. See? No problem.
The basic rule for pronouncing the symbols is left to right, top to bottom and how the symbol is written depends on the vowel. The other rule is that vowels characters can't come first (or stand alone) and, just as in English, only one vowel per syllable is allowed (and before you tell me that a one-syllable word like "book" has two vowels, pronounce it and rethink your stance on the issue).
Since you're already familiar with a few characters, let's take three from above: the consonant ㅎ and the two vowels ㅏ and ㅡ. From these three characters we can make two symbols: the left to right 하 and the top to bottom 흐 (I'll let you read back and figure out what sounds they represent or you can look at the chart below). It's the vowel in each of these symbols that decides whether the ㅎ will come to the left of it or on top of it. Look at the chart below and you'll notice that there are five vowels that force the consonants to come to their left, and five others that force the consonants to hover above them.

The basic chart. It does get a bit more complicated than this.

Like the chart shows, a Hangul symbol can be made up of just two characters, but many of them are made up of three or even four (although the syllables with four will have just three sounds with one of the bottom two symbols being silent). The chart doesn't show three or four character symbols so just for fun: two characters, 다; three characters,달 ; four characters, 닭. The first is pronounced "dah", although in Korean the "d" and the "t" are basically interchangeable--say them both in succession and you'll notice that the only difference is that you engage your vocal cords for one and not the other--so to some it might be more of a "tah". The second is pronounced "dal" and the third is "dak" and not "dalk" because the "l" is silent.
There are also double consonants and consonants with a little extra line. For example take the basicㄱ and double it, ㄲ, or give it the extra line,ㅋ, and the quality will change slightly. Hearing the difference between, say, 가 까 카 is quite difficult (oh, and look up at the chart and check out the slight difference in the way the "k" is written when it comes to the left of the vowel or above the vowel). The best way I can approximate the spellings of these symbols would be "ka" "ga" and "kka" respectively. The last one in the trio is an aspirated "k". Aspiration is when there is a little explosion of air leaving your mouth as you say it--say "cat" and "back" and you should notice that the "k" in "cat" is aspirated while it isn't in "back" (if you speak naturally and don't force it). I have trouble hearing the difference between these sounds unless I'm listening for it--and even then it isn't easy--but I've been informed that Koreans also have trouble with this and rely more on context to understand what's being said rather than sound.
In addition to having two or three consonant characters in a symbol, there can also be more than one vowel character. When this happens, though, it merely changes the vowel sound and does not give it an extra syllable. For example, 가 "kah" changes to 개 "kae" (the vowel being like the one in "pet"). The vowel in the latter is theㅏ plus theㅣ. Two other notes about vowels are that most of the them have a "y" counterpart (you can see this on the chart) so that ㅏ "ah" can becomeㅑ "yah". Also, there are what I call the "w" vowels. These are formed by combining either ㅗ or ㅜ with one of the vertical vowels--i.e. ㅘ "wa" and ㅝ "wo"--but there are only certain combinations that are possible.

Like Ami used to do in America when we were driving around town with all the English, I tend to walk around town or ride the subways trying to read some of the stuff around me. I read very slowly and often make mistakes, but I'm slowly getting better. Of course, it's not enough to just read Hangul as I often sound out a word and then have no idea what the word means, but sometimes I sound out a word and after saying it a few times realize it's English. I laughed at myself the day I slowly read 치킨 as I walked by a mysterious business of some sort. I stared at the sign slowly saying, "cheeeee....ken........cheee...ken, oh! Chicken". Mystery solved.

English words in Hangul