You might be thinking ‘if the Korean alphabet is so logical, then why are all the letters jumbled up instead of just being in a straight line?’ Well, this is the genius part of the Korean alphabet that makes learning new words and ideas very simple! However, it is most likely different from the letter orders in the alphabets you are most familiar with using.
In Korean:
‘ㅅ‘ sounds like ‘s’;
‘ㅏ’ sounds like ‘a’;
‘ㄴ’ sounds like ‘n’.
When put together they look like ‘산’ , which is pronounced as ‘san’. Rather than being just three letters in a line, it makes a nice self-contained block!
Korean is essentially made up of three types of words:
Words that are ‘pure’ Korean;
Words that are based on English (we will come to these later);
Words that are based on Chinese characters.
When we see 山 in Chinese we know this means mountain. Equally, in the Korean words that are based on Chinese, each block in Korean has the same meaning as a Chinese character. 산, in this context usually means ‘mountain’. This means that any time we see 산 at the end of a word, we can guess that it probably has something to do with a mountain. Easy enough, right?
In English, the spelling of the words ‘volcano’ and ‘iceberg’ are totally different from ‘mountain’. In Korean, they are 화산 (fire-mountain) and 빙산 (ice-mountain). This can help you learn words very quickly and guess new words without ever seeing them before. When you learn one word, you will have access almost instantly to other words and phrases that build upon that first word.
For example, from our earlier word 안과, if we are walking around the streets and see words like 내과, 치과, 피부과, etc., then we can guess that they have something to do with medical care. Equally, if somebody asks if you wear 안경 then we can guess that they are talking about glasses.
Look at the following list to see how quick it can be to learn new words using a bit of logic.
1 (and sun) = il
2 = ee
3 = sam
4 = sa
5 = o
Moon = wol
January = il-wol
February = ee-wol
1st March = sam-wol il-il
2nd April = sa-wol ee-il
3rd May = o-wol sam-il
Country = guk
Korea = han
Middle = jung
Person = in
Language / fish = eo
Korea = Han-guk
China = Jung-guk
Korean language = han-guk-eo
Chinese person = Jung-guk-in
Mermaid = in-eo
Reference: https://www.fluentin3months.com/korean/
