Learn to read and write the Korean alphabet

한글

Hangul

The Korean writing system is called Hangul (한글), and is considered by many scholars to be one of the most elegant and easy to learn. It consists of 14 consonants, 10 vowels, and 27 additional digraphs, which are special combinations of other letters.

Korean can also be written in hanja (漢字), which uses Chinese characters, similar to Kanji in Japanese. While it is not commonly used nowadays, because of its erudite status it was widely published in literature until the 1990s.

ㄱ

ㄴ

ㄷ

ㄹ

l r

ㅁ

ㅂ

ㅅ

ㅇ

ng glottal stop

ㅈ

ㅊ

ㅋ

ㅌ

ㅍ

ㅎ

ㅏ

ㅓ

ㅗ

ㅜ

ㅡ

ㅣ

ㅑ

ㅕ

yeo

ㅛ

ㅠ

Related Lessons

漢字

Chinese Characters

While it's not commonly used nowadays, hanja (漢字) refers to the use of Chinese characters to write Korean. In fact it literally means "Chinese characters".

Despite being obsolete, it is still important to learn basic Hanja characters to better understand Korean etymology and read historical literature. Because of its erudite status, some publications continued to be printed in Hanja through the 1990s.

When Korean is written with Latin characters it is called Romaja (로마자), which literally means "Roman characters". There are various systems of doing this, but the most common ones use Latin pronunciations, which can be different from those of English. For instance the letter i makes a long-e sound like the word "greet" or the French word chic. In fact this pronunciation is the basis for the orthography of all Romance languages including Spanish, Portuguese and Italian as well.