KOREAN

How To Read Korean III

In the previous lesson, you learned some more letters in the Korean alphabet. You also saw some crazy tables that presented some Korean syllables that be made by matching up Korean consonants and vowels. You may have noticed that this page is “wider” than a normal page here at HowtoStudyKorean. Why is it like this? Well, we have an even crazier table to show you in this lesson, and we need all the space we can get.

In this final lesson of Unit 0, you will learn the remaining vowels that you will need to be able to read Korean. Most of these letters are called “dipthongs” – which is just a fancy way of saying that there are two vowels in one. After learning these final letters, you will be able to apply these letters to words and start learning simple sentences and grammatical formations.

Luckily, all of the letters you will learn in this lesson are based off vowels that you have already studied. You should remember these letters from before:

ㅏ = a

ㅓ = eo

ㅜ = u

ㅗ = o

There are four more vowels that can be made by adding one extra line to each of the previous vowels. By adding this extra line, a ‘Y’ sound gets added to each vowel:

ㅑ = ya

ㅕ = yeo

ㅠ = yu

ㅛ = yo

If we were to make some syllables with these new vowels, they would look like this:

약 = yak

역 = yeok

육 = yuk

욕 = yok

Two more common vowels are:

ㅐ = ae (a combination of ㅏ and ㅣ)

ㅔ = e  (a combination of ㅓ and ㅣ)

Though these two vowels have different Romanizations, they sound identical to one another. They both sound like “eigh” in “weigh”

If we were to make syllables with these new letters, they would look like this:

배 = bae (sounds like bay)

베 = be  (also sounds like bay)

Here is an audio file with a Korean person pronouncing “ㅐ” with starting consonants:

애, 배, 재, 대, 개, 새, 매, 내, 해, 래

Here is an audio file with a Korean pronouncing “ㅔ” with starting consonants:

에, 베, 제, 데, 게, 세, 메, 네, 헤, 레

(Yes, it’s exactly the same file. As I said, ㅐ and ㅔ sound exactly the same).

The remaining vowels to study are all composed of adding two vowels together to make a sound. The pronunciation for each of these is simply the sound of putting the two vowels together. For example:

ㅜ + ㅣ = ㅟ = wi (example: 쥐)

애, 뷔, 쥐, 뒤, 귀, 쉬, 뉘

ㅜ + ㅓ = ㅝ = wo (example: 원)

워, 붜, 줘, 둬, 궈, 숴, 눠

ㅗ + ㅣ = ㅚ = oe  (sounds like “way”) (example: 외국 = waygook)

외, 뵈, 죄, 되, 괴, 쇠, 뇌

ㅗ + ㅏ = ㅘ = wa (example: 완)

와, 봐, 좌, 돠, 과, 솨, 놔