한글Learn Hangul — the Korean Alphabet
Hangul is an alphabet of 24 letters, designed in 1443 to be taught to people who had never read anything — and it still works that way. The consonants are pictures of the mouth making them, the complicated letters are the simple ones with a stroke added, and the whole system takes an afternoon.
This section is the alphabet in eight pages: the letters, how they stack into blocks, what happens at the end of a syllable, how to write them and how to type them.
- 기본 자모Basic letters
- 24
- 자음Consonants
- 19
- 모음Vowels
- 21
- 쓰이는 글자Blocks in use
- 1,226/ 11,172
왜 쉬운가Why it is genuinely easy
Hangul was designed, on purpose, to be learnable in a morning. The design is still doing the work.
Consonants draw the mouth
ㄱ is the tongue root against the soft palate, seen side-on. ㄴ is the tongue tip on the ridge behind the teeth. ㅁ is a closed mouth from the front. ㅅ is a tooth, ㅇ is the open throat. Five shapes, and every other consonant is one of them modified.
A stroke means a puff of air
ㄱ → ㅋ ㄷ → ㅌ ㅂ → ㅍ ㅈ → ㅊ
The aspirated letters are not new shapes to memorise. Each is its plain partner with one stroke added, and that added stroke means exactly one thing: release it with a hard puff of air.
Doubling means tension
ㄱ → ㄲ ㄷ → ㄸ ㅂ → ㅃ ㅅ → ㅆ ㅈ → ㅉ
The five tense consonants are the plain letter written twice: throat tight, no puff at all. English has no equivalent, which is why they are the last thing to click, not the first.
Vowels are three marks
ㆍ sky · ㅡ earth · ㅣ human
Every vowel is those three combined. A mark to the right or above (ㅏ, ㅗ) is a bright vowel; to the left or below (ㅓ, ㅜ) is a dark one — and that split is what later decides whether a verb takes 아 or 어.
Letters stack into blocks
Korean is not written in a line of letters but in square syllable blocks: ㅎ + ㅏ + ㄴ becomes 한. The block always reads left to right, then top to bottom, and the shape it takes is decided entirely by the vowel.
Spelling is regular; sound is not
What is written is the word's real shape; what is said applies a handful of sound changes on top. That is why 좋아요 comes out joayo — and why the changes are worth learning as rules rather than as exceptions.
자모표The whole alphabet
Fourteen consonants and ten vowels. Everything else in the writing system is these letters combined.
Consonants 자음
Tense consonants 쌍자음
Vowels 모음
Compound vowels 복합 모음
배우는 순서The order to learn them in
Four sittings. Nothing here needs the one before it to be perfect first.
- The ten vowels. They are the fixed part of every block and there are only ten. Start with ㅏ ㅓ ㅗ ㅜ ㅡ ㅣ ›
- The plain consonants. ㄱ ㄴ ㄷ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅅ ㅇ ㅈ — nine letters, and you can already read most signs. The consonant table ›
- Blocks. How the letters sit in a square, and what ㅇ is doing there. Building blocks ›
- 받침, then the rest. Final consonants and the seven sounds they collapse into, then the aspirates and tense letters. Batchim ›
Write each letter as you meet it. Reading and writing Hangul are the same skill here in a way they are not in an ideographic script — a letter you have drawn once you will recognise upside down. Stroke order for all 24 ›
이어서Every page in this section
다음 단계Once you can read it
The alphabet is a week. This is what it is for.
자주 묻는 질문Common questions
How long does it take to learn Hangul?
An afternoon to read it slowly, about a week of daily contact to read it without thinking. It is an alphabet of 24 letters designed in 1443 to be teachable to people who had never read anything, and that design goal is still visible in it — the letters are shaped like the mouth making them, and the complicated-looking ones are the simple ones with a stroke added.
Should I learn Hangul or romanization first?
Hangul, immediately, and skip romanization almost entirely. Korean romanization is ambiguous — 어 and 오 both look like o-ish spellings to an English eye — and every hour spent reading “annyeonghaseyo” is an hour not spent reading 안녕하세요. Romanization is here for looking up a word you have only heard; it is not a stage of learning.
Is Hangul an alphabet or characters?
An alphabet. Each letter is a single sound, exactly like the Latin alphabet — but the letters are grouped into square syllable blocks, which is why written Korean looks like characters. 한 is not one character meaning something; it is ㅎ + ㅏ + ㄴ written in a box.
How many Hangul letters are there?
Twenty-four basic letters — 14 consonants and 10 vowels — plus 16 combinations of them (5 tense consonants and 11 compound vowels), for 40 in all. Those combine into 11,172 possible syllable blocks, of which only 1,226 appear anywhere in the 14,988 words on this site.
Why do Korean words look like they have circles in them?
That is ㅇ. At the start of a syllable it is silent — it exists to fill the consonant slot when a syllable really begins with a vowel, because a block must start with a consonant. At the end of a syllable the same letter is “ng”. 앙 is just “ang”: the first circle says nothing, the second says ng.