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Korean language belongs to the Altaic language family like Mongolian and Japanese.
There are about 75 million people in the world who speak Korean, and according to a statistic done in 2002, the rank is about 13th in the world.
The essential written language of Korean is the Korean Alphabet. It is similar to the English Alphabet, and each letter represents a different sound. But sometimes the letter's sound changes depending on the word or the way the word is used. Unlike the English Alphabet, in Korean Alphabet each written character represents a syllable. They also write it left to right. |
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Korean Vowels and Consonants
Hangeul (ÇѱÛ, the Korean alphabet) consists of forty letters. Twenty-one of these represent vowels (including thirteen diphthongs), and nineteen represent consonants.
* Vowels:
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| ¢Ñ Learning by Phoneme |
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* Consonants:
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| ¢Ñ Learning by Phoneme |
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How to Compose Syllabic Units
When we write individual letters in a syllabic unit for actual writing, there are five cases.
As illustrated in the following diagram, the individual letters are arranged and proportioned to fit neatly into a square box, and are always read from left to right, then top to bottom.
A maximal Korean syllable structure is CVCC, where C represents "consonant" and V "vowel".
While C is optional, V is obligatory. The Korean syllable structure can therefore be re-written as (C) V (C) (C). All the possible combinations of the syllable occurrences are exemplified as the following:
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