YO. Time to complete your mastery of the alphabet! Hopefully you had the basic…basics down, but in case you don’t, here are some more examples of the basic consonant/basic vowel combinations:
But the consonants and vowels mentioned in the last lesson isn’t it, or else there’d be no reason for this lesson. These basic consonants and vowels can be combined into Double Consonants and Double Vowels. These tend to get a bit messy, so I’ll take them on one by one. Remember, you can refer to the KBS Radio Website, Second Lesson for a native speaker’s rendition of all these new concepts. First up is Double Vowels.
Double Vowels
So the 10 basic vowels (in case you forgot them) are as follows: ㅏ(a)ㅑ(ya)ㅓ(eo)ㅕ(yeo)ㅗ(o)ㅛ(yo)ㅜ(u)ㅠ(yu)ㅡ(eu)ㅣ(e)
These 10 vowels can be combined to make several new vowels called Double Vowels. They can be combined in a number of different ways, but only two vowels to a combination. There are 11 of these double vowels, bringing the grand total up to 21 vowels. A little daunting but don’t worry; since these vowels are combinations of two basic vowels, just combine the sounds of the basic vowels and you’re good to go!
These new double vowels are: ㅐ(ae)ㅒ(yae)ㅔ(e)ㅖ(ye)ㅘ(wa)ㅙ(wae)ㅚ(oe)ㅝ(wo)ㅞ(weh)ㅟ(wui)ㅢ(ui)
You might be wondering why these are called double vowels. Well, like I mentioned before, they are made combining two basic vowels to make a new one. Here’s an example: ㅏ + ㅣ = ㅐ. Makes sense right? All but two of them use the basic vowels as building tools, the exceptions being ㅙ and ㅞ. These are combined by adding ㅗ to ㅐand ㅜ to ㅔ, respectively.
If you go and hear the lessons on the KBS Radio site, you might think that the ㅐ and ㅔsounds are the same. But they’re not, just trust me. And it’s okay if you get them confused; native speakers get them confused too! When spelling, it just becomes a matter of concentration and remembering which one goes with which word.
Double Consonants
There are actually two different scenarios when tackling Double Consonants: When the consonants are the same, and when they’re different.
The consonants that sound the same are called 쌍 (ssang) Consonants. There are only five consonants that can act as 쌍 consonants. They are: ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅆ ㅉ. Honestly, these do not sound that different from their single counterparts. The only difference is that these receive a lot more emphasis or stress when read.
Double Consonants are more than a little bit confusing. There are actually a set combination of which consonants can be paired with which, and their pronunciation, depending on certain rules, changes entirely. What I’ve gone by is the first consonant in the pair ALWAYS gets pronounced. The second one either changes the sound of the second character or gets its sound added to the second character or stays silent. I did tell you it was confusing. But don’t worry too much about this one, because they very rarely come up. If you are worrying, then check out this chart, courtesy of dahnyogakoreaclub.com.
A quick pronunciation note. Still confused about the rules? Let’s take an example given on the chart, 앉다/앉았어요.
That was a pretty long lesson, but I hope it was easy enough to understand. To recap, here are some examples of words using Double Consonants and Double Vowels:
These first two lessons should allow you to read anything written in Korean ever. Congrats on learning how to read! Pretty easy right? If you want even more practice, go ahead and follow senshuk for his Korean Word of the Day!
If you do have any questions, though, feel free to formspring me. Until next time, 안녕~.
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.
