Starting Point: Learning the Alphabets

Over the weekend, I decided to teach my bf (and he agreed to learn) Korean. Since I sort of now regret not blogging abt my Korean learning journey right from the start, I’ll start with blogging about his, then merge it with mine.

I remember being afraid to learn Korean at first, thinking that it is similar to Chinese (blocky looking and all) where the writing doesn’t relate to the pronunciation, and I had trouble memorising how to write Chinese words. Of course, now I know it’s pretty similar to English instead, each ‘letter’ having a sound and how it was specifically designed to be easy to learn. Well, at least the simple ones are easy to pick up, but the w- sounds complex vowels still took me a while to memorise and I can’t really tell when to use ㅂㅃㅍ or ㅐㅔ. Guess that really comes with more exposure?

One mobile app that really helped me out with learning the alphabets is TenguGo Hangul. They have well thought out lesson plans, coming in bite sizes, with quizzes in between to test your understanding. I used the Android version, but there’s an iPhone version as well. Both are free! They have similar apps for learning other languages as well, though I’ve not tried them. A note about the Android version, sometimes when I open it, it’ll only show a white screen and not load, but it’ll be fine after closing it (going to home screen) and reopening it.

Lame tricks I used to memorise the alphabets

1. ㅗ and ㅜ are similar looking, and I sometimes mix them up, so I came up with this…
ㅗ: o sound. like a pin (ㅗ) waiting to burst a ball/balloon (o) 오 *pop*
ㅜ: u sound. ㅜ fits snuggly into u’s hollow insides. ok, just realised this might look a bit wrong. :/

2. when to use ㅗ or ㅜ in the complex vowels
ᅪ: wa sound. uses ㅏ (a sound). the short strokes point UP and RIGHT. upright. :/
ᅯ: weo sound. use ㅓ(eo sound). opposite from upright, aka downleft :/

3. learning alphabets together with words helps me memorise better.

그: geu sound. meaning ‘that’. from G-Dragon’s song title 그 XX (That XX) and also Hyun Bin’s song title 그 남자 (That Man) from Secret Garden.

해: hae sound. no idea what it means. (edit: prolly related to the ‘to do’ verb, 하다, in conjugated informal present form.) picked it up from G-Dragon’s song lyrics in Heartbreaker, 지긋 지긋 지긋해 삐끗 삐끗 삐끗해 (don’t know how to translate, but u can look up the lyrics translation on your own). anyway, although ㅐ looks like H, it doesn’t have the h sound, but ᇂ has instead.

I don’t think my lame tricks would work on most of you, but these are just my examples. You should form your own to remember better. :D

Romanisation included at the end so that your eyes won’t cheat and read the easier-to-read English before your brain attempts to process the unfamiliar Hangul. ^^ I experienced that so much.

그 남자: geu namja
지긋 지긋 지긋해 삐끗 삐끗 삐끗해: jigeut jigeut jigeutae ppigeut ppigeut ppigeutae (read tae cos the h sound gets eaten by the previous word’s last consonant ㅅ’s  t sound)