Phrases for beginners #1

The Korean alphabet, as complex as it looks, is really quite simple. Perhaps the most pleasing aspect of written Korean is that -- as opposed to English -- there is almost always only one way to pronounce a written word, and just one way to write what you might already know how to pronounce. The written alphabet was designed that way intentionally, during a project commissioned by Sejong the Great, fourth king of the Choson dynasty. Although the written language might appear to be complicated, there are only 14 consonants and 6 vowels.

Let's parse our first phrase:

How are you?
안녕하세요?
an-nyong ha-se-yo?

Each Korean syllable is formed by one vowel and one or two consonants. For example, the phrase above begins with the syllable 안 (or an, pronounced like the syllable hon in honest. This syllable comprises three "letters" or characters: ㅇ + ㅏ + ㄴ. This demonstrates how Korean characters are combined into syllables. The ㅇ, which is silent in our example, is combined with ㅏ, which is pronounced like the o in got, to form 아. Since the ㅇ is silent, this 아 is again pronounced like the o in got. Next, we add the consonant ㄴ, which is the equivalent of the English n. The result is 안 an.

This demonstrates the particular sequence of Korean characters within a typical syllable. This syllable begins with an initial consonant, in our case the silent ㅇ, followed by a vertical vowel (ㅏ) and a trailing consonant (ㄴ). Voilà: 안. (By the way, voilà defined literally means "see there" in French. Stick around, I'm a fountain of useless knowledge!)

You might say that the characters are combined in a clockwise fashion, beginning with the upper-left character followed by a character "on the right" and terminating with a character "on the bottom."

Now for our next syllable 녕 (nyong): For lack of a similar syllable in English, I'll just say that the yong portion is pronounced like young in English, preceded by an n: nyong. We form the syllable following the rules I described in the previous paragraph: We begin with ㄴ, which as we already know is pronounced like the English n, followed by a new vowel ㅕ(yo, pronounced like the yu in yummy).

Next we append the ㅇ, which we learned earlier. However, I'm sorry to say that you'll have to remember that whereas ㅇ is silent when it's the initial character in a syllable, it is pronounced as a trailing ng when it is the ending character of the syllable. It's one of the only unusual aspects of the written language that you'll have to memorize.

We have now combined the characters ㄴ, ㅕ, and ㅇ(n, yo, and ng into our second syllable, which is pronounced nyong. We have formed our first Korean word: 안녕 an-nyong, which means peace! On that note, I'll wrap this up for now. We will continue with this lesson with my next post.

Recommended reading: Korean/Alphabet (WikiBooks)