Tips on reading Hangeul

Canadian Connection send me an orientation booklet that had some notes on the Hangeul alphabet. I am not an expert on Hanguel but you can learn 90% of it by making flash cards of the characters you see below. The only real trick is learning to recognize the order of the characters within the character blocks (see the bottom picture).

You can double click the pictures to enlarge them. You'll notice Hangeul uses the same character for G and K, thus you'll see the city named spelled Gwangju and Kwangju when it is converted to English. The same is true for D & T, R & L, and B & P (thus Pusan and Busan). One thing my booklet didn't mention was how to use this character: ㅇ. When it appears at the front of a character block it is a silent placeholder. When it appears at the end of a character block is an 'ng' sound. Yeonggwang is an easy example of both uses.

The Hangul for Yeonggwang is 영광.

When you breakdown the two character blocks for Yeonggwang they go in this order:
FIRST
ㅇ - silent
ㅕ - yeo
ㅇ - ng

SECOND
ㄱ - g
ㅘ - wa
ㅇ - ng

So if you write it out in English letters you get YEONG GWANG.

The only other thing you really need to be aware of is that the Koreans often write the characters so that they are touching. For example it almost always looks like the ㅇ and ㅕ characters at the beginning of Yeonggwang (영) are touching. This makes it a little harder to pick out the individual characters.

The Hangul for Gwangju is 광주.

Here's the breakdown for Gwangju:
FIRST
ㄱ - g
ㅘ - wa
ㅇ - ng

SECOND
ㅈ- j (jieut)
ㅜ - u

So if you write it out in English letters you get GWANG JU.

This is the introduction.


The first set of characters.


The second set of characters.


An explanation of the character blocks.


A close-up of the character blocks.