English Korean Dictionary

The first step in learning the Korean language is becoming familiar with the Korean alphabet, as it’s likely considerably different from the other languages you’re familiar with. When first seeing the Korean alphabet, many people assume that it is just a bunch of squiggles and that it is as impenetrable as learning the thousands of Chinese characters that students of Mandarin face. Believe it or not, this causes some learners to give up before they even start!

With only twenty-four letters in the Korean alphabet, it doesn’t take long to learn. Equally, while some writing systems look impossible to scribe, Korean is easy. One of the letters is a circle, one is a square, and two are literally straight lines!

Hangul has another huge advantage over Chinese characters in that it is phonetic. Even if many Chinese characters may have phonetic elements to them, Korean is entirely phonetic. There aren’t hidden sounds or pronunciations that new learners are expected to know right off the bat. In fact, it has this advantage over the Latin alphabet too.