Hangeul Basics

The Korean writing system, called Hangeul, is one of the easiest writing systems you can learn. It is so easy that it will only take you a couple of hours until you can read and write most of it.

Sounds exciting? Then let's start learning it. We will be covering it in the four steps:

💡Tip: We highly recommend you to learn Hangeul before anything else and NEVER start using the Roman alphabet ("Romaji") to write Korean. It will help you a lot to memorize and pronounce words and will speed up your learning process. So focus on Hangeul first!

📄 Basic Facts

• Like the Latin script (what you are reading right now), the Korean alphabet (Hangeul) is composed out of consonants and vowels.

• The letters are not logographic like Chinese, so you only have to learn around 40 very simple letters by heart.

• Hangeul has 19 consonants and 21 vowels.

• Instead of being written sequentially from left ro right like "mul" or "sal", the letters are grouped into syllable-blocks which look like this "물" or this "살", which would be equal to the following:

mul --> ㅁㅜㄹ --> 물
sal --> ㅅㅏㄹ --> 살

• Each block consists of two to six letters, including at least one consonant and one vowel.

Consonants

These are the 19 consonants you have to learn by heart:

⚠️ Careful 1: Some consonants are romanized (and sometimes pronounced) differently depending on whether they are at the end of a syllable-block or not. For example, ㄱ is usually written as "g", but when it comes at the end of a syllable, it is written as k. For example: 먹 -> meok or 김 -> gim

⚠️ Careful 2: There are various ways to romanize Korean letters. We are using the Revised Romanization on Koreanji.com since it is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea.
You also often see different romanizations for historical reasons. For example, the famous food "Kimchi" would correctly be written "Gimchi", but since it is commonly known as "Kimchi" for many years you almost never see "Gimchi". Another exception is the famous last name "Kim".

Vowels

These are the 21 vowels you have to learn by heart

🎮 Time to practice!

This is the best time to introduce you to our Games Section. In our Games Section, you can take quizzes related to the content of the study section so you can tighten exactly what you have learned.

Right now, you should memorize as many Hangeul characters as you possibly can. Then, try out our first quiz:

Hangeul to Romaja I (Radicals)

On each study page on Koreanji.com you can find related games to what you have just learned. Make use of them! ^_^

Next: Hangeul Advanced