Korean Writing - Hangul

Koreans recently celebrated 한글날 – Hangul/Hangeul Day on October 9^th. Hangeul is the Korean writing which was made by King Sejong the Great (세종대왕). Also the guy on the 10000 won bill (만원), which is roughly equivalent to 10 dollars.

So what’s so great about Hangul that there’s a holiday for it? (By the way, yes there’s no school on this day). Well, before Hangul, everyone in Korea used Chinese characters. In fact, Chinese characters are still in use today in Korea, but for more formal matters and Chinese characters are taught in schools. To know someone’s meaning of their Korean name, you must know which Chinese character is used for their name, because “Chan” means multiple things but the Chinese character specifies which meaning it is. But, back in ancient Korea, Chinese was used all the time, obviously because there was no other writing before Hangul.

King Sejong the Great felt the need to make a whole new writing system because Chinese is too difficult and he saw his people struggling. When you compare Korean writing and Chinese writing, anyone can see that Chinese writing is more complex. So King Sejong invented Hangul!

You have no idea how grateful I am to King Sejong. Because I’m teaching myself Japanese and they use some Chinese characters still (Kanji) and boy, it is difficult. As a Korean-American, I never learned any basic Chinese characters whatsoever so Kanji is a kick in the head for me. But even for the Korean children in Korea who learn Chinese characters, it’s still difficult to them. (And also difficult for Chinese people). So I’m not the only one who is grateful for the invention of Hangul, the rest of Korea is also, hence Hangul Day!

How Hangul works is pretty simple, I think of it as basic math. Keyword is basic! It’s just addition. You first write the necessary consonant, and a consonant always needs a vowel, otherwise it can’t be read, so you add the necessary vowel.

Consonant	Vowel	Result
ㄱ (g)	ㅏ (ah)	가 (gah)

It’s really simple, right? It’s not wrong to say that learning how to read and write in Korean is easier than learning to speak it. If I want to make it a step further and add another consonant to my result it would be like this:

Consonant	Vowel	Consonant	Result
ㄱ (g)	ㅏ (ah)	ㅁ (m)	감 (gahm)

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