KoreanRead

How to learn Hangul, the Korean alphabet

Hangul has 40 letters — 19 consonants and 21 vowels — and most learners can read them within a week. Each letter stands for one sound, and the letters stack into square blocks of one syllable each. Learn the 40 shapes and you can sound out any Korean word on sight, long before you know what it means.

  1. Step 1

    Start with the 21 vowels

    Every syllable block needs one. They are built from a vertical or horizontal stroke plus dots, so they are quick to tell apart on the page.

  2. Step 2

    Then the 19 consonants

    Fourteen basic letters and five tense doubles. Letters that sound alike look alike, so they come in families rather than one at a time.

  3. Step 3

    Put them together

    The syllable chart lays out all 380 consonant-vowel combinations, 235 of them with audio.

  4. Step 4

    Check the exceptions

    A handful of syllables are not read the way they are spelled. The rules page quotes the article behind each one, in the original Korean.

All 40 letters

Every letter has its own page with stroke order, the sound in IPA, the syllables it forms and the words that use it.

Consonants

Vowels

How a syllable block works

Korean does not write letters in a straight line. A consonant and a vowel are packed into one square — 가 is ㄱ with ㅏ on its right, 고 is ㄱ with ㅗ underneath. Which side the vowel goes on depends on its shape: vowels built on a vertical stroke sit to the right, vowels built on a horizontal stroke sit below. That is the whole rule for the 380 blocks in the syllable chart, 251 of which have a page of their own here.

Questions people ask

Is Hangul hard to learn?
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No, and it was designed not to be. It has 40 letters, each standing for a single sound, and the shapes of the consonants were drawn to look like the mouth position that makes them. Reading comes within days; the vocabulary and grammar behind it are the long part.
What order should I learn Hangul in?
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Vowels first, then the basic consonants, then the tense and aspirated ones. Vowels are easier to hear apart, and every syllable block needs one, so learning them first lets you read something on day one.
Do I need to learn Chinese characters to read Korean?
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No. Modern Korean is written in Hangul. Chinese characters appear occasionally in academic or legal writing to disambiguate a word, but you can read newspapers, subtitles and song lyrics without them.
Why are Korean letters stacked into blocks?
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Each block is one syllable. A consonant and a vowel are written together in a square so the text lines up syllable by syllable — 가 is ㄱ plus ㅏ, not two separate letters side by side.
How is Hangul different from an alphabet like Latin?
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It is an alphabet, but a featural one: letters that share a sound family share a shape. ㄱ ㅋ ㄲ are all k-sounds and all built from the same stroke, so the writing system itself tells you how the sounds relate.