FAQ About Korean Alphabet - Hangeul(Hangul)

Hangul has it's origins in Chinese characters. Chinese characters were used in Korea until the 15th century. However, because it was difficult to learn, King Sejong in 1443 asked scientists to solve this problem.

There's 24 letters in the alphabet. 14 of them consonants and 10 of them vowels.

Hangul was invented based on the shape of the tongue while saying the letters.That's why the alphabet shaped like that.

Beside the core alphabet there's also other letters in the Korean alphabet like semi vowels, double consonants and compound consonants.

Each letter corresponds to what linguists refer to as a phoneme essentially just an individual sound. This differs from other writing systems, like Japanese, that are syllabaries, in which each letter represents a full syllable.