The Development of Hangul

davisblair — Sun, 17 May 2009 23:32:11 +0000

Hangul is the alphabetic writing system of Korea developed in the 15th century during the reign of King Sejong. Until this time, Korea used Chinese as the written language, but as in Japan, an alphabet was developed to increase literacy among the general population and make it easier to read and write without having to learn the thousands of characters required to be literate in Chinese. Hangul is phonetic and it is easy to learn the system, which has consonants that have counterparts in English that are almost exact, as well as a set of vowels that also follow simple rules. There are some differences; some letters do not have exact matches. The Korean “Riul” letter (ㄹ) for example, is a blend of the “R” and “L” letters in English. This is why native Korean speakers have a hard time pronouncing words with “R” and “L”. There are others that are different, which we will cover in the course of studying; suffice to say there are more similarities than differences and with a couple hours of practice you will be able to “read” words by sounding them out, even if you do not know what they mean. In this first lesson we will go through the Hangul alphabet in the video below, which will be followed by a lesson that describes how to combine the letters together in syllables and then words – also not difficult but does require an overview to understand.

For an excellent overview of the history and origin of Korean writing I recommend Omniglot.com’s overview located here.

Download the STUDY GUIDE here and print out prior to watching the video: Study Guide

Here is the Video:

Here is an interesting Flash Quiz to test what you learn.

Posted in basic korean, hangul Tagged: basic korean, hangul, language

Korean Language for English Speakers

The Development of Hangul