Consonants and Vowels

The Korean alphabet, like the English alphabet, consists of consonants and vowels. The vowels are the ones you have to buy on the game shows.

In the box at the left you see a Korean consonant in lonely splendor. This consonant has the sound of the n in the word name.

Man does not live by consonants alone; a language needs vowels to function. In the box at the left is the Korean vowel that sounds like ah, the vowel sound you use when you say aha, which is what you're saying right now, because it's so easy and you understand it! Click the syllable to hear it.

Syllables surrounded by a thick border will produce sound when clicked if you have Javascript enabled.

The speaker icon also produces sound.

When we put consonants and vowels together, we get syllables. The concept of syllables is the key to the Korean alphabet.

The Mighty Syllable

All words in Korean are composed of syllables, which follow these basic rules:

A syllable begins with a consonant.
A syllable has at least one consonant and one vowel.
Each syllable gets written in a square box.

So let's put the (n) and the (ah) together into a syllable that fits into a square box:

You'll notice that the consonant (n) has changed its shape a little to accommodate the vowel that has joined it in the square box.

How do you think this syllable is pronounced? If you said na before looking at this text, you are right.

Here are two more consonants:

, which is pronounced like the m in mother.

, which is pronounced like the h in hot.

Try to figure out how these syllables would be pronounced:

, , and

Stacking Syllables

Here's how these syllables from the previous page are pronounced:


ma	ha	na

The last two syllables form an actual Korean word: which means “one.” It’s pronounced ha-na, as you probably already guessed. (Note: when we write Korean words in English letters, we’ll separate the syllables with dashes.)

Here’s another consonant: It's pronounced somewhere between the k in king and the g in guess.

This tutorial will follow the Korean government’s official guidelines for romanization (writing Korean words with a Latin alphabet). These guidelines are based on the standard Korean pronunciation of the letters rather than a simple letter-to-letter correspondence. That means we’ll use the letter g for the Romanized version of this consonant when it takes that sound, and k when that’s the sound you would normally hear.

We can use this consonant to write the Korean word for a persimmon: “gam.” It’s a one-syllable word, but if we put all its sounds next to each other we won't have a square box any more:

This problem is easy to solve: we stack up the and on top of the so that it all fits into a square box:

So, learning the Korean alphabet is a simple matter of learning the letters and learning how to stack them up into a square box.

More Vowels

Are you tired of having only to work with? Would you like to buy some more vowels? Here are two more for free:

, pronounced like the o in oh!

, pronounced like the oo in moon. [The standard way of writing Korean using English letters, known as Romanization, uses the letter u to stand for this oo sound, and that's what we'll use from now on.]

Now we have to stack our consonants and vowels on top of each other if we wish to stay within the square box:

This syllable: is pronounced mok with a long o, and it's the word for neck or throat.

, meaning door, is pronounced mun with a long u.

Letter-stacking rule: vowels that are "vertical", like , go to the right of the first consonant in your syllable. Vowels that are "horizontal", like , go under the first consonant in your syllable. All of this is done to make sure that syllables fit into a square box.

Let's Go Crazy!

Let's look at a word that has both horizontal and vertical vowels in it: This word: , meaning elder sister, is pronounced nu-na.

Here's another word: . It means tree. Can you figure out how it's pronounced? (Answer on next page).

What was that word?

Let's break (the word for tree) up into its parts, taking it out of the square syllable boxes so we can figure out how it's pronounced:

n	a	m
		u

This word is pronounced na-mu .

Pretty easy, isn't it? It's a simple application of the rules for syllables:

A syllable begins with a consonant.
A syllable has at least one consonant and one vowel.
Each syllable gets written in a square box.

On the next page are the rules for writing syllables into a square box.

Syllable Stacking Rules

A syllable that consists of a consonant and a "vertical vowel" is written with the consonant on the left and the vowel on the right:

A syllable that consists of a consonant and a "horizontal vowel" is written with the consonant on top and the vowel underneath:

If a syllable has a consonant, vowel, and consonant, the final consonant, called patch'im (meaning "supporting floor" in Korean) goes to the bottom -- or floor -- of that syllable.

m	+	a	+	n	=	man
m	+	o	+	k	=	mok

Notice that all these examples follow the basic rule that all syllables must begin with a consonant. This means that we may have a problem...

What's the Problem?

We have a slight problem with one of our rules for writing syllables. What if we want to write the Korean word for afternoon, which is "ohu"? If we split it into syllables, o-hu, we see that the first syllable begins with a vowel, and that violates rule 1, which says that all syllables begin with a consonant.

To solve this problem, Korean uses this letter: . When it starts a syllable, it is a silent placeholder consonant.