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About Korean Art - in eBook form
The Korean Alphabet: An Introduction
Korean-Arts' Newsletter - Sign up for updates on our specials, sales and new items!
WC100S/L $8/$10 WC101S/L $10/$12 WS100S/L $8/$10 WS101S/L $10/$12
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 M305S $17
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Our articles about the art of Korea are now available as an eBook for your PDA!

    Download our free eBook about the art of Korea! It contains all the article above in the handy eBook format for viewing on your PDA. Click the link below to download it now. After you download it, move it to your PDA and it will be added to your Microsoft Reader Library.

eBook - 'About the Art of Korea'

The Korean Alphabet:
An Introduction

History and Form
Syllable Positions
Korean Alphabet Chart
Handy Word and Phrase List
Grammar Notes

 

History and Form

    The Korean alphabet (called "Hangul" in Korean) was developed by a team of scholars under King Se-jong (1397-1450) of the Yi Dynasty and is the most recently invented and most scientifically designed alphabet in the world. "Hangul" has only 21 vowel/vowel combinations and 19 consonants, 5 of which are the same symbol repeated twice and 5 of them are simply a consonant with the addition of an accent mark. That makes a total of only 30 basic character shapes to be learned.

    Due to western influence "Hangul" is often written from left to right and top to bottom like English, but can also be written from top to bottom and right to left like Chinese.

    Each letter of the alphabet is a simple shape that represents a sound, (some characters change sounds or just have a harder sound depending on their location in the syllable). Example: The Korean letter "ㄱ" sounds like a G in the initial position in a syllable and like a K in the final position in a syllable as we can see in the word "국 Guk,"

국 Here the letter "ㄱ" sounds like G because it is in the initial position in the syllable.
Between the two consonants is the vowel "ㅜ"; it is represented by a U and sounds like the oo in Pool.
And the "ㄱ" here in the final position sounds like a K.

"국 Guk" is the Korean word for country. (The sound changes are recorded on the last page and are easy to follow).

    Each word in Korean is broken down into syllables which are composed of 2 to 4 characters; every syllable starts with a consonant and has a vowel in it. For example: The word for Korea in Korean is  "한국 Han guk"; here is a breakdown of the letters and syllables for the word "Han guk"

    Syllable #1.

한 Consonant; "ㅎ" sounds like the letter H as in hotel.
Vowel; "ㅏ" sounds like the letter A as in father.
And the "ㄴ" here in the final position sounds like an N.

    Syllable #2.

국 Consonant; "ㄱ" sounds like the letter G in the initial position.
Vowel; "ㅜ" is represented by the letter U and sounds like oo as in pool.
Consonant; "ㄱ" same as the first letter but sounds like a K because it is in the final position in the syllable.

    Read more...

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