Korean Vocabulary❤

How To Read Korean Pt. 1

Annyeong guys OuO 

This is Erika aka author nim here~ and for this chapter, it'l be about how to read Korean. This may be extremely hard, but for those who can read Korean a bit or who really wants to be able to read it, then have a look :3 i hope it's okay 

ENJOY!

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For now, don’t even think about words or grammar or anything until you can read and pronounce Korean letters and syllables. Without being able to read Korean, it is very difficult to continue studying other parts of the language.

I highly suggest that once you know how to read the Korean alphabet, you should completely abandon the Romanizations. For example, in the future, instead of studying like this:

학교 (hak-kyo) = school
You should study like this:
학교 = school

At any rate, study these characters like crazy. Memorizing them at first is hard, but it needs to be done. Luckily, Korean has a fairly simple ‘alphabet’, although it seems strange to most English speakers at first because it is completely different than English.

I am presenting the most simple letters first, and presenting more complex letters later. Unless you plan on attending kindergarten in Korean in the next few weeks, there is no immediate need to learn the alphabetical order. It’s definitely good to know, but for now, you have way more important things to worry about. Nonetheless, here is the actual alphabetical order, which is separated into consonants and vowels:

ㄱ ㄲ ㄴ ㄷ ㄸ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅃ ㅅ ㅆ ㅇ ㅈ ㅉ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎ
ㅏ ㅐ ㅑ ㅒ ㅓ ㅔ ㅕ ㅖ ㅗ ㅘ ㅙ ㅚ ㅛ ㅜ ㅝ ㅞ ㅟ ㅠ ㅡ ㅢ ㅣ

(This sound is very difficult to write in English, and is the reason why people from Korea/Japan have trouble pronouncing the R and L sound in Engrish. The sound of this letter (to me) is half way between an R and L. For example, if you were to say “I hadda good time last night” the ㄹ sound is very similar to the “dd” in the slang “hadda.” It’s not quite and R, and it’s not quite an L.)

The following are the first set of Korean consonants that you need to get into your brain. There is no easy way to explain them, you just need to memorize them:

ㄱ= k
ㄴ= n
ㄷ= d
ㄹ=r/l

ㅁ= m
ㅂ= b
ㅅ= s
ㅈ= j
ㅎ= h

One incredibly important thing before you continue. People constantly ask me about the pronunciation of Korean letters, and how they can be best represented using English (Latin) characters. There is no perfect way to represent Korean characters using English letters (or sounds). The English letters presented above are the letters that you will commonly find being used to represent their respective Korean letters. While it is helpful (at first) to memorize the general sound of a Korean letter by using the English letter – you have to remember that Korean sounds are vastly different than English sounds. Not only are Korean sounds different than English sounds – but English sounds different depending on who is speaking (because of accents). Therefore, there is no perfect way to represent the Korean sounds in English.

For example, you will often see:

“K” and “G” used to represent “ㄱ.”
Or “D” and “T” to represent “ㄷ”
Or “R” and “L” to represent “ㄹ”

None of those letters matches perfectly with the sound of their respective Korean letter. The only way to know exactly how a Korean letter sounds is to listen to it. Trying to represent it with an English letter (whose pronunciation could change based on the person speaking) doesn’t work. I'm very sorry that I cant really attatch a file to let you listen to pronounciations but I really wish I could D:

Anyways, memorize the English equivalents of the characters to help you at this stage, but try not to think that the sounds are exactly the same.

Well i'm going to upload soon... but please tell me if it is okay or not. I shall be back with the next part *^* thanks! 

OH! And since my dear friend, 

strawberry_HUSTLE

 wanted me to make this chapter, I dedicate this to her/him. Gomawoyo! 

ADIOS