Now that you’re familiar with hangul (click here if not), it’s time you learned how to string the letters into words - and of course, there are rules.
In Korean you might have letters, but you don’t put them next to each other like in English. Instead, they form them into blocks of maximum four letters or characters if you will. I will keep to calling the individual characters letters and the letters put together I will call a block, to keep it simple.
Let’s get some examples on the table!
Here we got the fewest possible letters attainable in a block. You write the block from left to right, upper then lower level. You write your sentences and words from left to right. Notice: You will never ever use a vowel on its own. If your word begins with a vowel you’ll always start off by using the silent “ㅇ”, like you see in blue block one.
Now you might only know this letter as “ng”, but don’t be confused, when it begins a block it’s silent when it ends a block it has the “ng” sound. This also means that a block doesn’t need a consonant to end, only to begin.
So the blocks are written like this: ㅇ+ㅣ= 이 ㅅ+ ㅗ= 소
This is the middle option. As you can see they follow the rules from before.
Again, you see even though our vowel in green block two, isn’t alone it still needs the “ㅇ” to start it off.
ㅁ+ㅜ+ㄴ= 문 ㅇ+ㅣ+ㄹ= 일 ㅁ+ㅏ+ㄹ= 말
This is the maximum number of letters you can have in a block.
Notice: In pink block two there are two vowels put together as one. Here the “ㅜ” is further to the left and therefore it’s written first, even though it’s lower than the “ㅣ”.
ㄷ+ㅏ+ㄹ+ㄱ= 닭 ㅌ+ㅜ+ㅣ+ㄹ= 튈
The elusive double consonants ㅃ,ㅉ,ㄸ,ㄲ,ㅆ is treated like any other consonant.
