How To Learn Korean Language

Korean Alphabet

The following are the first set of Korean consonants that you need to get into your brain. There is no easy way to explain them, you just need to memorize them:

ㄱ= k
ㄴ= n
ㄷ= d
ㄹ=r/l *
ㅁ= m
ㅂ= b
ㅅ= s
ㅈ= j
ㅎ= h

* (This sound is very difficult to write in English, and is the reason why people from Korea/Japan have trouble pronouncing the R and L sound in Engrish. The sound of this letter (to me) is half way between an R and L. For example, if you were to say “I hadda good time last night” the ㄹ sound is very similar to the “dd” in the slang “hadda.” It’s not quite an R, and it’s not quite an L.)

I want to say one incredibly important thing before you continue. People constantly ask me about the pronunciation of Korean letters, and how they can be best represented using English (Latin) characters. There is no perfect way to represent Korean characters using English letters (or sounds). The English letters presented above are the letters that you will commonly find being used to represent their respective Korean letters. While it is helpful (at first) to memorize the general sound of a Korean letter by using the English letter – you have to remember that Korean sounds are vastly different than English sounds. Not only are Korean sounds different than English sounds – but English sounds different depending on who is speaking (because of accents). Therefore, there is no perfect way to represent the Korean sounds in English.

For example, you will often see “K” and “G” being used to represent the Korean letter “ㄱ.”
Or “D” and “T” to represent the letter “ㄷ”
Or “R” and “L” to represent the letter “ㄹ”

Truth is, none of those letters matches perfectly with the sound of their respective Korean letter. The only way to know exactly how a Korean letter sounds is to listen to it. Trying to represent it with an English letter (whose pronunciation could change based on the person speaking) doesn’t work. Throughout our lessons (not just in this Unit, but in future Units as well), you will find thousands of audio files attached to vocabulary, letters and example sentences. The best thing you can do is listen to those audio recordings as much as possible to train your ear to the correct sounds.

Anyways, memorize the English equivalents of the characters to help you at this stage, but try not to think that the sounds are exactly the same.

Next are the basic vowels you will need to know. Again, do whatever you can to memorize the English representations to help you learn them.

ㅣ = i
ㅏ = a
ㅓ = eo (Romanized as “eo” but it sounds closer to “uh” in English)
ㅡ = eu
ㅜ = u
ㅗ = o

You should notice that the first three vowels are drawn vertically, and the bottom three are drawn horizontally. If you can’t see what I mean, look at the following picture for a more exaggerated depiction.