한글

What is 한글? Why, it's the Korean alphabet!

Let me first say that I love hangul (also written as hangeul). It's incredibly easy to learn and very convenient. I especially appreciate hangul because I've been learning Japanese for years. I taught myself hiragana, katakana, and hangul, but Chinese characters are still challenging to write and remember. I also don't study them as much as I should. Because it's a pain :/
For those of you who have never learned a language from an East Asian country before, I can provide some information on Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. They are not related. None of them share the same language family. They all use different writing systems. They have very different sound patterns and ways of pronunciation. Chinese and Japanese sound absolutely nothing alike.

Throughout history, Chinese culture had great influence in the region.
Chinese characters do not represent sounds, but meanings. Chinese characters are known as hànzì in Mandarin Chinese, as kanji in Japanese, and as hanja in Korean.

The Chinese language is only written in Chinese characters.
The Japanese language is written with a combination of Chinese characters (kanji) and the Japanese syllabaries hiragana and katakana.
The Korean language is written in the Korean alphabet (hangul).

People who speak Chinese must memorize thousands of Chinese characters in order to be literate.
People who speak Japanese must memorize a few thousand kanji and the phonetic hiragana and katakana, of which there are 46 each.
People who speak Korean must learn the Korean alphabet, which consists of 24 letters. (In some cases Chinese characters are still used in South Korea though, so it is useful to be familiar with them.)

While Chinese characters can go from being one single line to complicated characters with more than a dozen strokes, hiragana tends to be swirly, katakana is simple and has more straight lines, and hangul is basically lines and circles.

Even if you're not familiar with any of these languages and their different writing systems, simply by looking at them, visually the differences should be quite obvious:

こんにちは。
私はカナダに行きたいです。

안녕하세요?
저는 캐나다에 가고 싶어요.

您好
我想要去加拿大。

I'd love to write more about the Japanese writing system and whatnot, but this post is supposed to be about hangul. Don't hesitate to read about these writing systems online or in language books sometime though :)


Anyway, hangul is wonderful. It is also said to be the most logical and scientific writing system in the world. Why? Because it was specifically invented by scholars!
Once upon a time only hanja was used to write in Korean, but only the educated elite knew how to read and write because there are thousands of characters and it's difficult. So King Sejong the Great, in an effort to increase literacy and spread reading and writing to the lower classes, hired people to create a phonetic alphabet. It was completed in 1443. It took a while to catch on, but now it's used by every literate Korean-speaker. There's even a holiday for this great achievement, called Hangul Day!

I'm not going to teach you hangul here, but I will add that Korean letters are organized into syllable blocks. The word for "man", for example, is 남자 ("namja"). In Korean, this word has two syllables (count the blocks) and consists of five letters. The first syllable is 남, which can be romanized as "nam". It has three letters: ㄴ (n) and ㅏ (a) and ㅁ (m). They are grouped together to form the first syllable of this word, "남". Letters are always grouped into blocks in writing. It's how hangul works and is used. It's in the rules. That's why the word "man" is always written as 남자 and never as ㄴ ㅏ ㅁ ㅈ ㅏ (that looks totally weird).

As for romanization, Chinese has the official pinyin system, Japanese romanization is usually simple and straightforward, but Korean is a bit more challenging. There is not one standard. The McCune–Reischauer romanization was widely used, but there is also a new revised romanization of Korean.
I'd much rather read Korean in hangul than in the Latin alphabet, because there is often confusion due to a mixture of romanization methods.

For example, the letter ㅓis often romanized as eo or u or o or ŏ.
But there is also ㅗ which is o.
The letter ㅡ is written as eu or u.
Meanwhile, the letter ㅜ is romanized as u or oo.
Therefore, at times I have no way of knowing which Korean letter a u might be referring to in romanized text.
This problem exists for consonants too. ㄷ is written as d or sometimes as t. ㅌ is almost always written as t. The same goes for ㄱ and ㅋ. 강남 is written as "Gangnam" or "Kangnam". In the Latin alphabet, ch could be referring to ㅈ  or ㅊ. Since I'm not familiar with every Korean word, I often don't have a clue if a Korean word that begins with k in the Latin alphabet is written with ㄱ or ㅋ in Korean.

Sometimes, different ways of romanizing even appear in the same word. For example, the name 서현 is written as Seohyun, though the eo and u in this word actually represent the same sound in Korean, yet different letters are used in the romanization. Also, the name 규현 is written as Kyuhyun, but both yu's in the word represent different letters in Korean (ㅠ and ㅕ).
Such discrepancies are often due to a standard for a particular name, for visual purposes, or for convenience since most people are not familiar with how romanized Korean should sound. I'd guess that few people would know how they should try to pronounce eo, but using u in a romanization could lead them toward vocalizing a sound that is closer to the Korean ㅓ.
According to the romanization rules, 영 should be romanized as "yeong", but it's almost always written as "young". Another example is 현대. According to the romanization methods, it should be romanized as "Hyeondae" or "Hyundae", but instead it is written as "Hyundai".

When I read Korean names or words written in the Latin alphabet, I sometimes don't know which Korean letter the romanization is representing. With hangul, I always know how to pronounce words.


More information:
http://www.hangeulmuseum.org (click "English" at the top of the page)
Korea.net : The official website of the Republic of Korea