The ten basic vowels

Ten basic vowels are all built from two long lines, and a vowel can never stand alone: it always needs a silent round letter in front.

A good place to start reading Korean is the vowels, because there are only ten basic ones and they follow a clear pattern. Each is a long line, either standing up or lying flat, with one or two short strokes attached. Put one short stroke on the right of the standing line and you have a. Put it on the left and you have eo. Two short strokes add a y sound at the front: ya and yeo. The lying line works the same way. One stroke on top gives o, one underneath gives u, and two strokes give yo and yu. The bare lying line is eu and the bare standing line is i.

The silent round letter

In Korean writing a vowel never stands on its own. Every syllable block must start with a consonant letter, so when a syllable begins with a vowel sound, the block starts with the round letter ieung, which is silent in that position. The vowel a is therefore written as a two-letter block, round letter plus a, and read simply a. The same block shape gives the words for child (ai), cucumber (oi) and milk (uyu), which you can read by the end of this unit. At the end of a syllable the same round letter is not silent. It becomes ng, as in the English word sing. That comes in unit 4.

Two vowels that need care

Two of the ten have no close match in English. The vowel romanized eo is not the o of go. It is nearer the u in cup, said with the jaw a little more open and the lips relaxed. Many beginners say it like o, and then the words for fox and for yo-yo blur together. Put a finger on your chin: for eo the jaw drops, for o the lips push forward into a circle. The vowel romanized eu is said with the lips spread flat and the tongue pulled back, as if you started to say the oo of food but forgot to round your lips. English speakers often hear it as a short u. It appears constantly in loanwords, where it fills gaps between consonants that Korean cannot pronounce together.

Writing the strokes

Korean handwriting follows two simple rules: top before bottom, and left before right. For the standing vowels you draw the long line first, then the short strokes from left to right, so for eo the short stroke on the left comes before the long line. For the lying vowels with strokes on top you draw those short strokes first and the long line last. With strokes underneath, the long line comes first. Stroke order matters less for reading than for neat writing, but learning it early stops shaky handwriting later, and it is how Korean children are taught at school.