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On the ninth of October, South Korea has a public holiday for its alphabet. It is called Hangeul Day, and once you know how the alphabet came about, a day off for it seems reasonable.
Before Hangeul
Until the 1400s, Korean was spoken by everyone and written by almost nobody. Writing meant Chinese characters, thousands of them, and they fit Korean badly. Learning them took years, which only the aristocracy had. A farmer with a grievance or a mother with a letter to send had no way to write it down.
King Sejong, the fourth king of the Joseon dynasty, took this on himself. In 1443 he introduced a new script, and in 1446 he published it in a short book called the Hunminjeongeum, "the proper sounds for the instruction of the people." The postscript says a clever person can learn the letters in a morning and a slow one in ten days. Some of his own scholars objected; giving ordinary people writing was, to them, a bad idea.
Where the letters come from
The consonants are drawings of your mouth making the sound.
- ㄱ (g) is the back of the tongue rising to block the throat.
- ㄴ (n) is the tip of the tongue touching the ridge behind the teeth.
- ㅁ (m) is closed lips.
- ㅅ (s) is a tooth.
- ㅇ (ng, or silent) is the open throat.
Say them slowly in a mirror and you can see it. A related sound gets an extra stroke, so ㄱ becomes ㅋ (k), and ㄴ becomes ㄷ (d) and then ㅌ (t). The vowels are built from three marks, a dot for the sky, a flat line for the ground, a standing line for a person, and every vowel in the language is some arrangement of those.
The letters are then stacked into square blocks, one syllable per block, which is why Korean text looks like rows of small tiles. 한글, the word Hangeul, is two blocks: 한 and 글.
Linguists generally describe it as the most deliberately designed writing system in use anywhere. The original book explaining it is on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.
Learning it
Because it is so regular, Hangeul really is a weekend's work. You will not understand Korean afterwards, but you will be able to read a menu, a station name, the title on a K-pop track. The first time a sign in a photo turns into sounds is a nice moment.
Writing the letters by hand is what makes them stick. A pen with some variation in the line, like the Pilot Kaküno, makes a page of ㄱ ㄴ ㄷ feel more like calligraphy than drills. If you would rather have the letters on your journal without the practice, there is a Korean lettering sticker set for that.
Start with your own name. It is usually three blocks!
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