The Korean writing system for beginners

What is Hangul?

Hangul is the alphabet used to write Korean. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes it as 24 letters, originally 28, of which 14 are consonants and 10 vowels. It was made the official writing system by a decree of King Sejong in 1446, under the name Hunminjeongeum, loosely "Proper Sounds to Instruct the People". In North Korea it is called Chosŏn muntcha.

Before Hangul, Korean was written with Chinese characters, which fit the language badly. The National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL) describes the workarounds that came first, such as borrowing characters for their sounds, and records that court officials petitioned against the new letters in 1444. Britannica notes that scholars and the upper classes did not use Hangul until after 1945.

Counting depends on what you include. NIKL lists 24 basic letters plus 16 compound ones, 40 in all: 19 consonant letters that can start a syllable and 21 vowel letters. The compounds are built from the basic 24, so those are what you learn first.

How were the consonants designed?

Five basic consonants are pictures of the mouth, according to NIKL's account of the original design:

Most other consonants add strokes to these. ㄴ gains a stroke to become ㄷ (d/t), a stronger sound made in the same place; ㅁ becomes ㅂ (b/p), ㅅ becomes ㅈ (j), ㅇ becomes ㅎ (h). One more stroke makes the aspirated, breathy version, and doubling a letter makes the tense one:

So the shapes tell you how the sounds are related. English has no tense series, which is why ㄱ, ㅋ and ㄲ take practice to hear apart, but you can read them apart from day one.

How do the vowels work?

The vowels grew from three strokes with a meaning in old Korean philosophy: a dot for the round sky, a flat line (ㅡ) for the earth and an upright line (ㅣ) for a person. A dot placed against a line made the other vowels, and the dot has since become a short stroke.

• One short stroke: ㅏ (a), ㅓ (eo) beside the upright line; ㅗ (o), ㅜ (u) on the flat line.
• Two short strokes add a y sound: ㅑ (ya), ㅕ (yeo), ㅛ (yo), ㅠ (yu).
• Combined vowels: ㅏ + ㅣ makes ㅐ (ae); ㅓ + ㅣ makes ㅔ (e); ㅗ + ㅏ makes ㅘ (wa); ㅜ + ㅓ makes ㅝ (wo).
• The two plain lines stand alone as ㅡ (eu) and ㅣ (i).

NIKL notes that the original dot vowel has dropped out of use, and that ㅐ and ㅔ, once pronounced differently, are now both simple vowels. In everyday speech they often sound alike, so learn the spelling with each word.

How do letters fit into syllable blocks?

Every block is one syllable, with up to three positions: a first consonant, a vowel, and an optional final consonant (batchim) underneath. NIKL's example is 꿀벌 (bee), written in two blocks, never as a row of loose letters. A syllable that starts with a vowel still needs a consonant slot, so it takes the silent ㅇ, as in 우유 (milk).

Where the consonant goes depends on the vowel's shape. Tall vowels such as ㅏ and ㅣ sit to the right of it; flat vowels such as ㅗ and ㅜ sit below. Here is a line from a beginner story, broken into its blocks:

In the next word, 손으로, the ㄴ at the end of 손 is pronounced at the start of the next syllable, so the word sounds like so-neu-ro. Korean spells the parts (손 + 으로, by hand) and lets the sound run on, which you will see in every chapter.

Why does Korean have spaces between words?

Modern Korean spelling puts a space after each word together with the particles and endings attached to it. NIKL dates today's spelling rules to a 1933 draft for unified Hangul spelling, partly revised in 1988. For a learner this is a gift: Japanese and Chinese run words together, but in Korean you can always see where a unit ends.

The catch is that a spaced unit is often more than a dictionary word. 손으로 is hand plus "with"; 편지다 is letter plus "is". Contos lets you tap each spaced unit for its meaning in that sentence, and our guide to how many Korean words you need shows how many forms one word can take.

Should you rely on romanisation?

Only for a few days. South Korea's Revised Romanization, published by NIKL, follows standard pronunciation rather than spelling, so it shows sound changes that Hangul hides. NIKL's own examples include:

That is useful for road signs and dictionaries, but it means the romanised word and the written word differ, and you need the written one to read. On these pages we give Revised Romanization under Korean lines as a guide only; the Contos stories themselves are in Hangul with no romanisation.

What does real beginner text ask of you?

We counted the syllable blocks in the 24 free A1 chapters of the Contos Korean library (October 2026). Together they hold 7,130 blocks, but only 485 different ones, and the 100 most common make up about 78% of the text. 다, the block that ends most plain sentences, is the single most common at 631, about one block in eleven. About 45% of blocks end in a final consonant. Across all four levels the free chapters use 887 different blocks.

Those blocks spell both native words and borrowed ones. This short A1 line has a Chinese-derived word and an English one:

You won't need Chinese characters. In the Contos free chapters the only deliberate one is a character's name, given in brackets at B2.

1. Learn the five base consonants and the vowel strokes, then the letters built from them.
2. Write blocks by hand for a few days: tall vowels, flat vowels, with and without a final consonant.
3. Read real sentences aloud, slowly, from the first week. Short A1 chapters are ideal.
4. Let romanisation go as soon as you can sound out a block without it.

Once the blocks come easily, the next step is the 15-minute Korean reading routine. If you are also weighing up Japanese, see how its scripts compare in Korean vs Japanese.