Hangul, the Korean alphabet, has 24 basic letters — 14 consonants and 10 vowels — which extend to 40 in the full modern set with 5 doubled consonants and 11 compound vowels. Each symbol below is a letter (jamo), not a syllable: letters stack into blocks, so ㅎ + ㅏ + ㄴ spells 한 (han). The charts give every jamo with its name, romanization, and closest English sound — printable, and free.
Dictionary order. These are letters, not syllables — a consonant never stands alone in writing but joins a vowel to form a block: ㄱ + ㅏ = 가 (ga). The plain consonants ㄱ ㄷ ㅂ ㅈ sound voiceless (k, t, p, ch) at the start of a word and voiced (g, d, b, j) between vowels, which is why romanizations of the same letter vary.
| Letter | Name | Romanization | IPA | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ㄱ | giyeok | g / k | /k/ ~ /ɡ/ | g in "go" between vowels; closer to k at the start of a word |
| ㄴ | nieun | n | /n/ | n in "note" |
| ㄷ | digeut | d / t | /t/ ~ /d/ | d in "door" between vowels; closer to t at the start of a word |
| ㄹ | rieul | r / l | /ɾ/ ~ /l/ | quick tapped r, as in Spanish "pero"; l at the end of a syllable |
| ㅁ | mieum | m | /m/ | m in "map" |
| ㅂ | bieup | b / p | /p/ ~ /b/ | b in "book" between vowels; closer to p at the start of a word |
| ㅅ | siot | s | /s/ | s in "sun"; sh before an i or y sound |
| ㅇ | ieung | — / ng | /ŋ/ | silent at the start of a syllable; ng in "song" at the end |
| ㅈ | jieut | j | /tɕ/ | j in "jam", a little lighter |
| ㅊ | chieut | ch | /tɕʰ/ | ch in "cheese" with a strong puff of air |
| ㅋ | kieuk | k | /kʰ/ | k in "kite" with a strong puff of air |
| ㅌ | tieut | t | /tʰ/ | t in "top" with a strong puff of air |
| ㅍ | pieup | p | /pʰ/ | p in "pet" with a strong puff of air |
| ㅎ | hieut | h | /h/ | h in "hat" |
Doubling a consonant letter marks the tense series: pronounced with a tightened throat and absolutely no puff of air. The three-way contrast is real — 달 dal (moon), 탈 tal (mask), and 딸 ttal (daughter) are three different words.
| Letter | Name | Romanization | IPA | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ㄲ | ssanggiyeok | kk | /k͈/ | a tight, flat k with no puff of air — the k in "sky", squeezed |
| ㄸ | ssangdigeut | tt | /t͈/ | a tight t with no puff — the t in "stay", squeezed |
| ㅃ | ssangbieup | pp | /p͈/ | a tight p with no puff — the p in "spy", squeezed |
| ㅆ | ssangsiot | ss | /s͈/ | a forceful, hissed s, as if leaning into the "ss" of "hiss" |
| ㅉ | ssangjieut | jj | /tɕ͈/ | a tight j with no puff — like the ch in "gotcha" said sharply |
A vowel's name is simply its sound — ㅏ is called "a". Vowels are built from three ancient elements: a horizontal line (earth), a vertical line (man), and a short stroke that was once a dot (heaven). A vowel never starts a written syllable by itself; the silent placeholder ㅇ carries it: ㅏ alone is written 아.
| Letter | Romanization | IPA | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|---|
| ㅏ | a | /a/ | a in "father" |
| ㅑ | ya | /ja/ | ya in "yard" |
| ㅓ | eo | /ʌ/ | u in "up" |
| ㅕ | yeo | /jʌ/ | yu in "young" |
| ㅗ | o | /o/ | o in "more" |
| ㅛ | yo | /jo/ | yo in "yogurt" |
| ㅜ | u | /u/ | oo in "boot" |
| ㅠ | yu | /ju/ | u in "use" |
| ㅡ | eu | /ɯ/ | oo in "good" with the lips spread flat, not rounded |
| ㅣ | i | /i/ | ee in "see" |
Combinations of the basic vowel strokes. Modern Seoul speech has merged some of them: ㅐ and ㅔ now sound identical, as do ㅙ, ㅚ, and ㅞ — Koreans keep them apart by spelling, not by ear.
| Letter | Romanization | IPA | Sounds like |
|---|---|---|---|
| ㅐ | ae | /ɛ/ | e in "met" |
| ㅒ | yae | /jɛ/ | ye in "yes" |
| ㅔ | e | /e/ | e in "met" — merged with ㅐ in modern speech |
| ㅖ | ye | /je/ | ye in "yes" |
| ㅘ | wa | /wa/ | wa in "swan" |
| ㅙ | wae | /wɛ/ | we in "wet" |
| ㅚ | oe | /we/ | we in "wet" — same as ㅙ today |
| ㅝ | wo | /wʌ/ | wo in "wonder" |
| ㅞ | we | /we/ | we in "wet" — three spellings share this sound |
| ㅟ | wi | /wi/ | wee in "week" |
| ㅢ | ui | /ɰi/ | eu and i glided together quickly — no English equivalent |
Hangul is fully alphabetic, but it is written in syllable blocks rather than in a row. Every block starts with a consonant (using silent ㅇ as a placeholder when the syllable begins with a vowel), adds a vowel to the right or below, and can end with one or two final consonants (the batchim). So 한글 (hangul) is not two characters but six letters: ㅎ+ㅏ+ㄴ and ㄱ+ㅡ+ㄹ. Once you can read the jamo, you can read every block — there is nothing else to memorize.
Korean consonants come in a three-way contrast English does not have: plain (ㄱ ㄷ ㅂ ㅈ), aspirated with a strong puff of air (ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅊ), and tense with a squeezed throat (ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅉ). English speakers hear all three as roughly the same sound, but 달 (moon), 탈 (mask), and 딸 (daughter) are three unrelated words. The plain series also voices between vowels — 고기 (meat) is pronounced roughly "koh-gee" — which is why ㄱ gets romanized as both g and k.
Final consonants are clipped: only seven sounds can actually end a syllable, so 꽃 (flower) ends in a t-like sound despite being spelled with ㅊ. But when the next syllable starts with a vowel, the final consonant slides over to it — 한국어 (Korean language) is pronounced han-gu-geo, not han-guk-eo. This liaison is the main reason spoken Korean sounds faster than the spelling suggests.
Hangul was created deliberately, by a named person, at a known date — almost unique among the world's scripts. King Sejong the Great, fourth king of the Joseon dynasty, completed it in 1443 and promulgated it in 1446 in a document called Hunminjeongeum, "The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People." His stated motive was literacy: Korean was then written in Classical Chinese characters that fit the language badly and took years of leisure to learn, locking ordinary people out of reading entirely.
The design is featural — the only script in wide use whose letters are diagrams of how you say them. ㄱ pictures the tongue root closing the throat, ㄴ the tongue tip touching the upper gums, ㅁ the closed lips, ㅅ a tooth, ㅇ the open throat. Adding a stroke adds aspiration (ㄱ → ㅋ), doubling adds tension (ㄱ → ㄲ), and the vowels are built from three philosophical elements: heaven (the dot), earth (the horizontal line), and man (the vertical line).
The literati resisted it for centuries, dismissing it as eonmun ("vernacular writing") and keeping Classical Chinese for serious work, but Hangul survived in fiction, letters, and women's writing. It became the standard script in both Koreas after 1945, and the Japanese colonial suppression of Korean in the late 1930s only cemented its status as a national symbol. South Korea celebrates Hangul Day on October 9; the Hunminjeongeum Haerye, the manuscript explaining the invention, is on the UNESCO Memory of the World register.
An alphabet. The blocks look like Chinese-style characters at first glance, but each block is just two to four letters stacked together: 한 is ㅎ + ㅏ + ㄴ. There are only 40 letters to learn, versus thousands of characters for Chinese — the block layout is a formatting convention, not a separate symbol set.
24 basic letters: 14 consonants and 10 vowels. The full modern inventory is 40, adding 5 doubled (tense) consonants and 11 compound vowels built from the basic strokes. Dictionaries and keyboards use the 40-letter set.
The letters, yes — Hangul is famously the world's most learnable script, by design. The 1446 commentary claimed a clever person could learn it in a morning and anyone within ten days, and modern learners routinely read simple words after a few hours. Sounding natural takes longer: the tense consonants and vowels like ㅡ and ㅓ need real practice.
The plain consonants ㄱ ㄷ ㅂ ㅈ change with position: voiceless (k, t, p, ch) at the start of a word, voiced (g, d, b, j) between vowels. 김치 starts with a k-ish sound, but the ㄱ in 불고기 (bulgogi) is a g. Romanization systems pick one letter per position, which is why you see both Kimchi and Gimchi.
Rarely. South Korea writes essentially everything in Hangul; hanja (Chinese characters) survive in name cards, legal and academic contexts, and newspaper headlines to disambiguate homonyms. North Korea abolished hanja from general use altogether. You can be fully literate in Korean without reading a single character.