The Korean alphabet is one of the easiest foreign alphabets to learn. I’m going to try and break it down as simply as possible but also with enough detail so that there isn’t much confusion. Let me emphasize that these are only the basics and meant to help from the perspective of someone who has learned it as a foreigner and not a native speaker.
The Korean alphabet has 14 consonants. For now just to simplify things I’ll put the officially recognized English equivalent beside each.
ㄱ= g
ㄴ = n
ㄷ= d
ㄹ= r/l (Functions as both an L and R depending on the word)
ㅁ= m
ㅂ= b
ㅅ= s
ㅇ = (filler, will be explained later on.)
ㅈ= j (Sounds like like the j in Jail)
ㅊ= c (Its more of a ch sound as in ‘Chair’)
ㅋ = k
ㅌ = t
ㅍ = p
ㅎ = h
The vowels are as follows, with the officially recognized corresponding sounds which will be directly beside the Korean, and my explanation in brackets.This is largely because I feel that something like ㅞ= we may be misleading.
ㅏ = ah (A in Already)
ㅐ= ae (A in Crazy)
ㅑ= ya (Yah sound in Yam)
ㅒ= yae (Similar to ‘Yay’ but with silent final y)
ㅓ= eo (Hard to explain it’s a cross between ah and oh)
ㅔ= E (E in Ever)
ㅕ= yeo (Yo in Your)
ㅖ= ye (Ye in Yes)
ㅗ= o (Oh in Over)
ㅘ= wa (Wa in Want but more emphasis on the a sound than want actually has. So the sound itself is more of a ‘Wah’
ㅙ= wae (Wh in Whale, silent h. None of that Stewie Griffin H pronounciation ;)
ㅚ= wi ( We)
ㅛ= yo (’Yoh’ as in Yo-yo but not when it’s pronounced yow-yow, no w sound)
ㅜ= u ( Oe sound in Shoe)
ㅝ= wo (Wo in Wonder)
ㅞ= we (We in Weld)
ㅟ= wi (We)
ㅠ= yu (You)
ㅡ= eu (U sound in Until)
ㅢ= ui (Usually this will be pronounced as another form of ‘We’. Alone it’s similar to when someone says ‘Oy/Oi’ but with more of a ‘u’ sound.)
ㅣ= i (Pronounced like the letter E.)
There are also accented sounds:
ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ, ㅉ.
These sounds are almost identical to their consonant counterpart as you can see they’re just written twice. This is meant to let the reader know that this sound needs to be emphasized or exaggerated. The easiest way to explain this without a video is to say that ㄲ would be ㄱ with and angrier sound and with sounds that require you to push air out such as S you would use more pressure.
Here is a link to a reference chart for the alphabet and how the vowels and consonants can be grouped together.
And here is a link to a decent video about pronunciation of vowels and consonants.
I might also make one in the future. Now that the pronunciation is out of the way let’s discuss some things. The vowels that you see above will never be by themselves as they are above, you can’t use them the way you might you ‘a’ by itself in a sentence in English. They will always be paired with a consonant, even if its to make the exact sound that they represent they will be with the consonant ‘ㅇ’ which by itself is has no sound but it rather a filler consonant.
What I mean by this is simply that if you want to write the sound ㅏ in a word, it will look like this: 아. The same goes for all of the other vowels.
Words in Korean are also sounded out into syllables, the difference between Korean and English though, is that in Korean you also write in syllable blocks. What that means is that if someone in English said ‘Hello’ it has two syllable sounds so in Korean in would be written Hel-lo. Here are some examples of common words and their spelling to give a better example:
Achim. Separated into syllables it’s Ah-cheem. (Morning)
In Korean the first syllable/sound would be 아 and the second 침. Therefore Morning is written as 아침.
Naeil (Tomorrow) is two syllables, and if you write the corresponding sounds it becomes 내일.
You will notice that the way the letters are put together they end up forming little squares called syllable blocks. There is somewhat of an order to how they are places, for example:
Mwo (What) combines the consonant ㅁ, with the vowel ㅝ. Because the M sound comes first it is placed in the top left corner/middle. 뭐. For the most part you don’t need to over complicate it or spend too much time thinking about it. 1. Sound out the vowels. 2. Put the corresponding sounds into blocks the way you hear them. You can refer back to morning, in the earlier example. Because this is just a basic explanation, which I may revise later, I won’t go into things such as spelling in terms of irregular verbs and nouns etc. This is just to give a basic handle.
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