한글

It is definitely possible--easy, even--to live your life in Seoul without speaking or reading any Korean. After working a nine hour day at the hagwon and rollin' into my apartment at 7:45, it's pretty tempting to remain ignorant... but in my opinion, that's just not cool. I'm not talking fluency, justing knowing a few phrases to allow for smooth(ish) communication between myself and cab drivers, servers, and shop clerks. So I practice a little each week.

In my humble opinion, Korean is really hard, at least for someone who has never studied an Asian language before. Most of the time, the sounds are incredibly difficult to imitate, but sometimes I can't even really hear the sound I'm supposed to produce. Korean isn't tonal, but it definitely has a lilt that is very unEnlgish and... well, I can't think of any words in the English language that use a tiny little pause with a glottal stop right in the middle of a word. GAH! It's tough. Thankfully, Koreans tend to be thrilled that foreigners have shown interest in their culture and language and are very gracious with bad accents and limited vocabulary.

One thing that isn't difficult to learn is Hangul. Unlike Japanese and Chinese, Korean doesn't use characters. Hangul is their alphabet, and though it may seem pointless to be able to read Korean if you don't understand what it says, I assure you it comes in handy, particularly with public transit and eating in restaurants. In honor of a dear friend who may be moving here in four or five months, I will be giving you a short lesson. Seriously... spend three hours working on it one afternoon when you would be stalking on facebook, watching Lost, or scratching your ass, and you will be able to read Korean.

Okay, so first things first. There are no capital or lowercase letters. Characters are stacked into squares, one square for each syllable. For example,ㅎ, ㅏ, ㄴ are three separate characters, but since they are all a part of the same syllable, they would be written like this: 한 Every syllable of every word in Korean begins with a consonant (written Korean, not spoken), and the following vowels are positioned either to the right or underneath the consonant. ㅎ is "h", ㅏ is "a", and ㄴ is "n"... meaning this is the first syllable of the word "hangul". Check the title of this post.

Here is a table of all the Korean characters:

ㅏ	ㅓ	ㅗ	ㅜ	ㅡ
ㅣ	ㅔ	ㅐ	ㅑ	ㅕ
ㅝ	ㅘ	ㅞ	ㅙ	ㅟ
ㅢ	ㅛ	ㅠ	ㅖ	ㅒ
ㅂ	ㅈ	ㄷ	ㄱ	ㅅ
ㅁ	ㄴ	ㅇ	ㄹ	ㅎ
ㅋ	ㅌ	ㅊ	ㅍ

So teaching you everything about hangul on this post would be pretty difficult, but I hope I've given you an idea. For those who wish to learn more, I was greatly helped (and stole a little from it for this posting) by this site. For more practice, try here.

안녕히 계세요!