안녕! Oh that? That’s Hangul.  Hangul is the language used in North and South Korea. Intelligentsia in the past used the Chinese script but it was hard to learn so farmers and common folk couldn’t express it in written form so King Sejong sympathized and decided to create his own language. He purposely made it so it was simple to learn and use, however there were originally 28 letters. The alphabet today consists of 24 letters and 27 digraphs, 14 of the letters are consonants while 10 are vowels.   

Basic Characters: 

http://http://https://modernseoul.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/korean-alphabet-chart-modern-seoul.jpg

Character Structure:

The language is composed of syllable blocks, each containing at least one consonant and one vowel. For example, my name, Kelly is two syllables so it would be 켈리.

The Use of Romanization:

Romanization is basically what korean represents in Latin characters. Take for example: 안녕, in romanization form it would be “annyeong (an-nyeong)”.

Respect:

Respect is SUPER important in Korea.

For example, there are multiple ways of saying thank you based on age, 감사합니다 : gamsahamnida (the most common, it’s formal as well as polite), 고마워요 : gomawoyo (use it when talking to older people who are close to you), 고마워 : gomawo (Use it when talking to younger people who are close to you).

Other Keywords :

• Younger girl to older boy : Oppa
• Younger Boy to older girl: Noona
• Younger girl to girl : Unnie
• Younger boy to boy : Hyung
• Older siblings to younger siblings: Dongsaeng
• Father: Abeoji
• Dad: Appa
• Mother: Eomeoni
• Mom: Eomma

Writing the Language:

When writing the hangul language each syllable block is written with at least one vowel and one consonant. Each part is written left to right up and down. To clarify I have made a tutorial on how to write Hi; Goodbye 안녕 .