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Last time I talked about some of the philosophical and design principles underlying the Korean alpabet — hangeul — and introduced the vowels.

This time, we’ll have a look at the consonants, starting with a little background on the elegant design principles behind them. Recall that the Korean alphabet was consciously designed rather than just having evolved, so linguistic elements and relationships were deliberately built into the alphabet.

Design

(If you’re not familiar with the linguistic terms above, velars (variations of k and “hard g”) are formed when the back of the tongue meets the upper back of the throat. Alveolar consonants (n, d, t, “flap r,” l) are formed when the tip of the tongue meets the alveolar ridge, on the roof of the mouth toward the front. Dental consonants (s, sh, j, ch, and similar consonants) involve friction between the tongue and the upper part of the top teeth. Bilabial (p, b, m) means two-lipped; the lips come together and are released. Vowels and glottal consonants (h and ‘ng’ in modern Korean) are formed in the throat.)

Korean consonants can be arranged into five groups based on depending on how the sound is produced within the mouth. Amazingly (to me, at least), each of these representative consonants is a simplified diagram showing the position of the organs of the mouth in forming those consonants. How cool is that?

Looking at the diagram, you should be able to see that there is an element common to all the consonants in a particular row.

The first consonant in each row is the simplest; this is a representative consonant for each group, and is the building block for the other characters in that group. These changes are largely systematic: adding a horizontal line to a simple stop consonant (sounds like the t/d or p/b pairs in English) forms the aspirated consonants (those made with extra air), doubling simple consonants gives us the “tense” consonants (pronounced with glottal tension, for which there is no real equivalent in English).

So, looking at the top row of the diagram, ㄱ( called ‘kiuk’) is a basic consonant. It sounds most like a hard ‘g’ in English (but has long been romanized as both ‘g’, ‘k’ and ‘c’, and so we have kimchi and gimchi, for example).
ㅋ(called ‘kiut’) adds an extra horizontal line, and gives us a more aspirated ‘k’ sound.
ㄲ (called ’ssang kiuk’ where ’ssang’ means double), the doubling of the basic consonant, gives us a slightly strangled (glottal tension added) ‘k’ sound, sometimes romanized ‘kk’.

Looking at the diagram, you might notice that there are other triplets as well — ㄷ ㅌ ㄸ (roughly and usually romanized d, t and dd), ㅂ ㅍ ㅃ (b, p and bb), ㅈ ㅊ ㅉ (j, ch and jj) — and one doublet ㅅ ㅆ (s, ss), the regular and aspirated ’s’ sound.

It is important to notice, if you’re serious about all of this, that there is no consistent differentiation between voiced and unvoiced consonants in Korea, as there is in English. Most English consonants appear in unvoiced/voiced pairs — t/d, p/b, k/g, s/z, sh/zh, f/v and so on — but in Korean, we have triplets — basic, aspirated, and tense. Voicing does appear in Korean, but as a function of location — for example, when a consonant appears between two vowel sounds in a syllable. This is, in my opinion at least, one of the root difficulties, almost universally ignored or misunderstood, in pronunciation interference for both Koreans learning English and English-speakers learning Korean. If you are a teacher, having a good understanding of this fact — that aspiration and glottal tension are the fundamental differentiator in Korean consonants, with voicing not contributing to meaning, while the exact opposite is true in English (and voicing has a strong effect in English on syllable length) — can be invaluable in helping your students understand how to clarify their pronunciation in a systematic way.

One thing that we have to note before going on: I mentioned that Korean vowels are invariant in the last article, but that is not true for consonants. The good news, though, is that the changes, based on position within syllables, are quite consistent.

A Note On Romanization

Romanization is a somewhat complicated issue, unfortunately, and the revised romanization instituted by the Korean government in 2000 (not without criticism) to replace the McCune-Reischauer system of 1984 has not percolated in any systematic way through the country yet. The new system eschews use of diacritics and other non-alphabetic symbols (other than the hyphen, occasionally), and was intended in part to make it easier to type romanized Korean on computers. It is far from perfect, but is, in my opinion at least, an improvement. The major strike against it is that it essentially requires one to be familiar with the sounds and conventions of spoken Korean, and so, though useful for Korean speakers, is of limited use ‘out of the box’ to those who don’t speak Korean.

The Korean government site has this to say about that

It is true that most Westerners hear “ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, and ㅈ” as “k, t, p, and ch” when these consonants appear as the first letter in a word. But the problem is that “ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅊ” also seem like “k, t, p, and ch” to the average Western ear as well, and the differences between each of these vowels are important in Korean. The Korean phonological opposition must be given first priority in a Romanization system designed for Korean, even if to foreign ears these differences are not easily recognized. In addition, when the differences between “ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, and ㅈ” and “ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅊ” are written with consistency, it makes non-native pronunciation of Korean more distinguishable to native speakers.

and I tend to agree with them.

English Equivalents

Here, then is a table showing rough equivalents for the consonant sounds in English,which you can compare with the diagram earlier:

Putting It Together

OK, let’s look at a couple of examples of putting together letters to make a syllable. There are consistent rules for making syllables, which we’ll look at in Part 3, but for now, a few sounds to flex our Korean muscles.

Let’s take ㄱ + ㅏ = 가.

ㄱsounds like a hard ‘g’. ㅏ sounds (always) like ‘ah’ (this is not romanization, but phonetic rendering for clarity). So

ㄱ + ㅏ = ‘ga’ (which has in the past often been written ‘ka’). It’s the root of the verb ‘to go’.

How about another?

ㅅ + ㅗ + ㄴ = 손

ㅅ sounds like a soft, lightly aspirated ’s’, ㅗ is always the monophthong ‘oh’ and ㄴ is exactly equivalent to ‘n’.

ㅅ + ㅗ + ㄴ = 손 = ’sohn’, romanized ’son’. It’s the noun ‘hand’.

At this point, I will leave you once again with this link to give you some audio help. Try the first few lessons again to get try and nail down your sounds. Don’t worry if there are things you don’t get yet, like the logic behind the position of characters within syllables — I’ll be covering them in future. At this point, though, with some practice, you should be able to sound out most (but not all, because we haven’t talked about consonant positional variation yet) syllables you see.

As an exercise, try to sound out this:

안녕하세요?

When you’ve got it, you’re able to greet someone, to say hello in mid-level formality, in Korean, the first thing everybody learns.

(Spoiler: it sounds like an yeong ha sae yo, with the syllables run together, following closely on one another.)

Stay tuned for Part 3, where we’re going to start pulling everything together, and the real power of hangeul starts to shine.

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Korean is a very different language, structurally, from English and many European languages. For Korean students of English, and for speakers of other languages trying to learn Korean, it’s a hard slog getting beyond the basics. To my continuing shame, although I can read and write the language with some facility, after nearly 10 years of exposure to it (and, I’ll admit, study of it that has been at best haphazard and desultory), I’m very far indeed from fluency.

The good news, though, is that reading it is literally a snap. A few hours with the basics, and almost anyone can be up and running. Or walking, at least. The writing system is about 14,000 times simpler to learn (scientifically speaking!) than Chinese or Japanese, and truly elegant in its design, philosophy, and suitability for capturing the sounds of the spoken language.

Before we begin with the basics, you’ll need to be able to actually see the Korean text in this page. Tutorials on how to install East Asian fonts (if you don’t have them already) can be found at Wikipedia, for a variety of common operating systems.

If you can’t see this — 안녕하세요! — then go and install the fonts, and come back. It’s OK, I’ll wait.

History

Right, let’s begin with some background.

King Sejong was the 4th King of the Choson Dynasty. In 1446 (dates vary, as do details of the story), scholars of the government office chip’yon’jon, or the Pavilion of the Assembly of Sages, were appointed by the King to invent a new writing system for Korean. Until that time, Chinese characters had been used to represent the sounds of the syllables of spoken Korean (The characters are called hanja, and still sometimes used to this day in print. Learning a basic set of 1800 of them was until recently a compulsory part of the education of all South Koreans, and they still play an important part in place names and personal names).

Writing had for centuries been the province of the educated elites, and this new system (although scorned in early days as writing for ‘women and children’) was created with the aim of spreading literacy. It was a success — Korea now has a literacy rate of 97.9 percent, one of the highest in Asia.

A book of instruction for the new writing system was published, called Hunmin Chongum: “The proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People”. The script it introduced later became known as 한글 (in the new romanization, hangeul).

If there is sound natural to Heaven and Earth, then there should certainly be writing natural to Heaven and Earth. Thus the men of antiquity relied on sounds and designed characters, thereby to convey the circumstances of the Myriad Things and to register the Way of the Three Germinants, we of later generations cannot change them. However, the winds and soils of the Four Quarters diverge, one from the other and sounds and breaths, following them, are likewise different. Presumably because the outer kingdoms have their sounds but lack characters for them, they have borrowed the characters of Chinese to take care of their needs. This has been like a handle that ill fits the hole; how could they have been applied with out obstructions?
-Hunmin Chongum

The Vowels

Besides its simplicity and elegance, one of the most fascinating things about the Korean alphabet is its grounding in the philosophical principles of the time, and its deliberate connections to the physical configurations of the organs of speech.

There are ten vowels (and eleven diphthong vowel combinations) and fourteen consonants (and five doubled consonants) for a total of 40 phonemes. Characters are shaped with symbols (dots and circles, horizontal lines, and vertical lines) that represent the fundamental elements of the cosmology: respectively heaven, earth and humanity. Heaven is a round dot, Earth is a horizontal line and the symbol of mankind is a vertical line. All the vowels in the Korean language are combinations of dots, horizontal and vertical lines. These signs are further balanced into the the opposing energies of yang (bright) sounds and yin (dark) sounds.

Here are the vowels:

The ten basic vowels are those with only one long straight vertical or horizontal line (earth and human): ㅏ and ㅑ, ㅗand ㅛ, ㅓand ㅕ, ㅜ and ㅠ, ㅣ and ㅡ.

If the dot (represented in this font as a shorter perpendicular line) is to the right of the vertical, we get some of the “bright” vowels: ㅏ ㅑ ㅐ ㅒ. If it’s above the horizontal, we get the last two brights: ㅗ ㅛ.

If the dot (represented in this font as a shorter perpendicular line) is to the left of the vertical line, we get the “dark” vowels: ㅓㅕ ㅔ ㅖ. If it’s below the horizontal, we get the other two darks: ㅜ ㅠ.

If there is no dot, the vowel is neutral:ㅣ and ㅡ

Adding a second dot (short perpendicular) to a vowel adds a “y” before the basic vowel sound(”ah” becomes “yah”, for example): ㅑ, ㅒ, ㅕ, ㅖ, ㅛ and ㅠ.

A horizontal vowel (ㅗ or ㅜ) can be paired with a vertical vowel to form a diphthong. The horizontal vowel always comes first in the pairing, and this results in a “w-” sound in front of the pure vowel to give us sounds like “wah,” “weh,” “wi,” and so on: ㅘ ㅙ ㅚ ㅝ ㅞ ㅟ and ㅢ.

So far, we haven’t matched any of the characters to their actual sounds, so don’t worry if it’s not coming together for you yet.

For that, I’m going to give you this link for basic vowels, and this one for dipthongs. Open it in a new tab or window, and mouse-over to listen to the vowel sounds as you look over what I’ve said about the vowels. If you repeat the sounds, think about the shape of your mouth as you make them, and how that relates to the bright/dark/neutral labels.

Coming Soon

If you want to skip ahead and listen to the consonants as well on those pages, they will be the focus of Part 2, where we’ll see how the design of the consonants (which are created in all languages by the modification and interruption of the flow of air by the physical parts of the mouth) are cleverly modelled on the physical movements needed to create them.

Part 3 will deal with how syllables and words are put together, the relatively simple rules for reading and writing them, and the few but consistent exceptions.

Part 4 will talk about the difficulties and challenges of the romanization of Korean, why it’s such a mess, why Koreans have so much trouble with English pronunciation (though they need not) and what you can do to make the situation better as a teacher (if you are one).

For now, one parting piece of essential advice to keep in mind: unlike English, the sounds of Korean vowels are (essentially) immutable. No matter where they are in a syllable, they make the same sound. This is one of the pure joys of learning to read Korean, and something that many (if not most) new learners of Korean miss, in part because of the confusion that reigns in romanization.

Have fun. You’re about a third of the way to being able to read Korean!

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