Lesson #1: The Alphabet 

First thing’s first when learning any new language is to get the building blocks of the alphabet down. The Korean alphabet is called 한글 (pronounced hangul). Korean, like English, has a set of consonants and vowels. There are 14 basic consonants and 10 basic vowels, and if you do the math, it comes out to 24 letters.

The basic consonants, in order are: ㄱ(g,k)ㄴ(n)ㄷ(d,t)ㄹ(r,l)ㅁ(m)ㅂ(b,p)ㅅ(s)ㅇ(ng)ㅈ(j)ㅊ(ch)ㅋ(k)ㅌ(t)ㅍ(p)ㅎ(h)

The vowels are:ㅏ(a)ㅑ(ya)ㅓ(eo)ㅕ(yeo)ㅗ(o)ㅛ(yo)ㅜ(u)ㅠ(yu)ㅡ(eu)ㅣ(e)

There are a couple notes to be made here. Firstly, the consonant ㅇ is silent whenever found as the first consonant of a character (read later on if you’re confused). Secondly, you might find other letters that I didn’t include here like ㅟ, ㅐ, ㅔ, ㅆ, ㅃ, ㅉ, and ㄲ. Don’t worry, these are, for a lack of a better word, complex or double letters and I’ll write about them next lesson.

There are different ways to romanize the sounds of the consonants and vowels, and I don’t particularly agree with any of them, and so I never bothered to learn how to correctly romanize the sounds. The ones that I included are the most recent and widely used ones, and for the most part, they stand to be pretty true. Just keep in mind that they don’t sound like that all the time, just like how the letter “A” sounds different in words like “ate” and “cat”. If you want to hear what a native Korean sounds like when saying these, click here and open the first lesson “Vowels and Consonants”.

There is also a specific order you’re supposed to write these letters, as in you have to write the strokes in a specific order. This is not as important if you’re going to read and speak it, but if you want to write it as well, you should probably learn the order. Generally, the order for most of the characters is to move diagonally from the top left to the bottom right of the character. Again, not that important, even then, but I did have to learn the order of the strokes when I went to Korean school, so I felt that I should mention it somewhere here.

Combining these letters into characters is just as simple as learning them. They are combined in this format: consonant-vowel-consonant. Simple as that. Sometimes, the second consonant isn’t even there, so it’s consonant vowel. Of course, this is another over-simplification, but for now, let’s focus on this format. There are already tons of characters and words you can form with this format alone. Here are some examples:

바나나: (ba-na-na) - banana

사자: (sa-ja) - lion

우유: (oo-yoo) - milk

기차: (gi-cha) - train

학교: (hak-gyo) - school

Sorry there are only five, but believe me, a lot of Korean uses this format. You should be able to read most Korean text with just this tool in your proverbial toolbox. This will be expanded more in the next lesson, but until then, 안녕!

*This first lesson was written completely off memory, so it may not be as helpful as I think it is. Please let me know.