Hangeul step 1/es

Introduction

Bienvenido! A diferencia del japonés y del chino, los fundamentos de la escritura básica del coreano se pueden aprender en pocas horas. La única forma de pronunciar las el lenguaje coreano con precisión es utilizar su escritura. Al tener el inglés y el coreano diferentes sonidos, usar la romanización como técnica para aprender coreano no es una muy idea. Por ello, hemos elaborado un plan de aprendizaje con 6 unidades y se han utilizado diversos métodos para ayudar aprender más rápida y eficazmente el idioma coreano. Éste es un proyecto conjunto entre la Korean Wiki Project y TalktomeinKorean.com. Gracias a la colaboración de todos, esperamos que este proyecto se lleve a cabo. Gracias por su apoyo y ayuda.

Más adelante se creará una unidad 7 para para ayudar con la pronunciación avanzada.

Brief history

See full article at The Origin of Hangeul

A page from the Hunmin Jeong-eum Eonha

Hangeul was introduced under Sejong the Great and finished around 1444. Up until and even after that time, Chinese characters were used as the written language, limiting reading and writing to the royal and government elite. King Sejong wanted Korea to have its own script that could be easily learned by anyone--even commoners. After its creation, Hangeul was said to be easy enough to learn that a wise man could finish it in the morning and a fool could finish it by night. For this reason there was opposition to Hangeul for a time by Korean aristocrats, believing only those of social superiority should have the privilege of learning to read and write.

Ever since Hangeul was first introduced, it went through many phases of refinement. Korean went through a large reformation during the Japanese colonization in the early 1900's, removing many of the now-archaic letters and changing several rules.

For more information on Hangeul, check out this wikipedia article. For those interested in learning Korean Sign Language (KSL), please see the page on sign language.

Letters

Korean is very different from other Asian languages in that it uses letters that are arranged in character form. Just like English, letters are classified as either consonants or vowels.

Consonants

The letters for the consonants fall into five groups, each with a basic shape and one or more letters derived from this shape by means of additional strokes. The basic shapes represent the positions of the tongue, palate, teeth, and throat when making these sounds. The consonant clusters are not common and can only appear in the bottom position of a syllable.

Simple: ㄱ, ㄴ, ㄷ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅂ, ㅅ, ㅇ, ㅈ, ㅎ
Tense (or stressed) consonants or glottalized (written as two simple, identical consonants and involve tensing of the involved speech organs): ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ, ㅉ
Aspirated (blowing more air than the simple consonant on which it is based): ㅊ, ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ
Consonant clusters (containing two unrelated consonants): ㄳ, ㄵ, ㄶ, ㄺ, ㄻ, ㄼ, ㄽ, ㄾ, ㄿ, ㅀ, ㅄ

Vowels

Korean vowels cannot be written by themselves and must be written with a consonant. If just a vowel sound is made in a syllable, the consonant "ㅇ" acts as a silent placeholder for the consonant position. Why does Korean require a consonant be written with vowel? Think of the ying and the yang concept. So for example, in order to make the ㅏ sound in an actual word, it must be written as 아 where ㅇ is the silent consonant which acts as the placeholder for the consonant.

Simple vowels: ㅏ, ㅓ, ㅗ, ㅜ, ㅡ, ㅣ
Iotized (Adds a 'y' sound): ㅑ, ㅕ, ㅛ, ㅠ
Dipthongs (combinations, usually adding a 'w' sound): ㅐ, ㅒ, ㅔ, ㅖ, ㅚ, ㅟ, ㅢ, ㅘ, ㅝ, ㅙ, ㅞ

Structure

The easiest way to describe the structure of Hangeul is that of its being a combination of both a letter-based system of writing, like the language of English, and a character-based system of writing like Chinese. Korean syllables are organized into blocks of letters that have a beginning consonant (called Cho (Hangeul: needed)), a middle vowel (called Jung (Hangeul: needed)), and an optional end consonant (called the batchim (Hangeul: 빋침)). A syllable block has a minimum of two letters, consisting of one consonant and one vowel.