Classroom lesson · Hangul - Korea's clever alphabet · 🇰🇷 South Korea

Hangul - Korea's clever alphabet

An alphabet that was carefully designed in 1443, on purpose

Portrait of King Sejong the Great, who created the Korean alphabet

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

Hangul is the writing system used in Korea. Unlike most alphabets, which grew slowly over thousands of years, Hangul was deliberately invented by one king in 1443 - so that ordinary people could learn to read and write. It only has 24 letters, and each letter shows how your mouth makes the sound.

Tell me more

Most alphabets, like the one you are reading right now, weren't designed by anyone. They drifted from one script into another over hundreds of years. Hangul is different. It was created on purpose by King Sejong the Great in 1443, with the help of his scholars. The king wanted writing that any farmer or child could learn in a few days.

There are only 24 letters in Hangul - 14 consonants and 10 vowels. The clever bit is the shape of each one. The consonant shapes copy what your mouth, tongue and throat are doing when you make that sound. For example, the letter ㄴ (n) looks a bit like the side view of a tongue touching the roof of the mouth. Once you know the trick, the letters almost teach themselves.

Letters in Hangul are not written in a straight line, the way English ones are. Instead, two or three letters get stacked into a little square block to make one syllable. The word 'Korea' in Korean is 한국 - just two blocks. Each block is one beat: han · guk.

Today, Hangul has its own national holiday in South Korea on 9 October - 'Hangul Day' - to celebrate the alphabet. Schools have writing competitions, and people sometimes wear t-shirts with Hangul letters as a design. Linguists (scientists who study language) often call Hangul one of the most logical writing systems ever invented.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01Why might a king want every child in the country to learn to read?
  2. 02If you were inventing a new alphabet from scratch, what would you do differently from English?
  3. 03Hangul letters are shaped like the mouth making a sound. Can you think of other things that are designed to copy how something works?
Try this

Classroom activity

Look up the 14 Hangul consonants and 10 vowels online (Wikipedia has a clear chart). As a class, try to write your own name in Hangul blocks - sound by sound. Compare how many letters your name has in English versus how many syllable-blocks it would be in Hangul.