0.1 The Most Learnable Alphabet in the World — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say that Hangul was designed , by a named king, and promulgated in 1446 — it was not inherited or evolved. Explain how the consonant letters were drawn from the shape the mouth makes, and point to the part of the mouth a given letter is a picture of. Read a syllable block the way it is built: an onset letter, a vowel letter, and sometimes a letter underneath. Say why Hangul is neither Chinese characters nor a syllabary, and why that matters for how fast you can learn it. Prerequisites : none. This is the first lesson of the course. Almost every writing system in use today was inherited. The Latin alphabet you are reading came to English through Rome from Greece from Phoenicia, and nobody chose its shapes; they drifted. Hangul is one of the very few exceptions. It has an inventor, a date, and a surviving document that explains, letter by letter, why each shape is the shape it is. That is unusual enough to be worth a lesson on its own, and it is also the practical reason this volume needs only six lessons: a system that was designed to be learned quickly can be learned quickly. An alphabet with an author and a date King Sejong completed the system in 1443 and published it in 1446 under the name 훈민정음 (Hunminjeongeum) — "the correct sounds for the instruction of the people". Before it, Korean was written with Chinese characters, which meant that literacy required years of study in a foreign written language. The preface says plainly what the project was for: 予爲此憫然，新制二十八字，欲使人易習，便於日用耳。 [1] "Feeling pity for this, I have newly made twenty-eight letters, wishing only that people may learn them easily and use them conveniently every day." Twenty-eight letters were defined; four have since fallen out of use, and the modern set is twenty-four. Everything you will read in modern Korean — every newspaper, every street sign, every message — is built from those twenty-four letters and a small number of letters made by combining them. You will have met all of them by the end of lesson 0.4, and you will be reading unfamiliar words aloud by the end of lesson 0.5. It is worth being precise about the claim, because "easiest alphabet in the world" is the kind of thing said about many writing systems. The measurable part is this: the letters are few, their shapes are systematic rather than arbitrary, and the relation between letter and sound is close to one-to-one. What is not easy is the relation between the spelling and the actual sound of a word in connected speech, which is governed by rules Hangul deliberately does not show you. That is why this course gives the alphabet six lessons and the sound system eight. Reading Hangul is a week's work. Pronouncing Korean is not, and lesson 1.1 starts on it. The letters The consonant letters are the part that makes the design visible. Five basic shapes were drawn as pictures of what the mouth is doing, and the rest were made by adding strokes to those five. Read the first column aloud as you go down the table; the sounds are given in the English words closest to them, which is an approximation that lesson 1.1 will correct. Letter Roughly What the shape is a picture of ㄱ g / k the back of the tongue rising against the soft palate, seen from the side ㄴ n the tongue tip touching behind the upper teeth ㅁ m the outline of the closed lips ㅅ s a tooth, for the hiss made at the teeth ㅇ ng, or nothing the open throat Now the additions. A stroke added to a basic shape means "the same place in the mouth, but with more air". Basic With a stroke added What the added stroke means ㄴ n ㄷ d, then ㅌ t same tongue position; stop the air, then release it with a puff ㅁ m ㅂ b, then ㅍ p same lips; stop the air, then release it with a puff ㅅ s ㅈ j, then ㅊ ch same teeth; add a stop, then add the puff ㄱ g ㅋ k same soft palate, released with a puff Look at what you have just been given. Learning ㅁ tells you something about ㅂ and ㅍ ; the three are not three separate facts to memorise but one fact with two extensions. Nothing in the Latin alphabet works like this. There is no visual relation between m , b and p , and no reason there should be — the shapes came from three unrelated Phoenician pictures. Lesson 0.3 goes through all fourteen consonants on this principle, and lesson 1.1 deals with the three-way contrast the puff of air creates, which is the hardest sound problem in the language for an English speaker. The vowels are built from three symbols that were meant to stand for heaven, earth and the human being: a dot, a horizontal line and a vertical line. In the printed letters the dot became a short stroke, so a vowel is a long line with one or two short strokes attached. ㅏ is a vertical line with a stroke to the right; ㅓ has it on the left; ㅗ is a horizontal line with a stroke above; ㅜ has it below. Lesson 0.2 takes all ten. Syllables are written in squares Here is the one structural thing that will surprise you. Korean letters are not set in a line. They are grouped into syllables, and each syllable is arranged inside an invisible square of the same size as every other square. Take the syllable 한 , the first syllable of 한국 (Korea). It contains three letters: ㅎ h, then ㅏ a, then ㄴ n. The ㅎ goes top left, the ㅏ stands to its right because it is a tall vowel, and the ㄴ sits underneath both. Read in the order you assembled them, the block says han . Block Letters in reading order Sound 가 ㄱ + ㅏ ga — two letters, side by side 고 ㄱ + ㅗ go — the wide vowel goes underneath instead 간 ㄱ + ㅏ + ㄴ gan — a third letter goes below the first two 한 ㅎ + ㅏ + ㄴ han — the same frame with a different onset Whether the vowel stands beside the consonant or sits under it depends only on the vowel's own shape: tall vowels go to the right, wide vowels go below. That is the whole layout rule, and lesson 0.2 makes it explicit. A letter in the bottom position has a name of its own, 받침 , and it behaves differently from the same letter at the front of a block; lesson 0.5 is about that, and l