Lesson 3: More Basic Korean Letters

In the previous lesson, you learned some more letters in the Korean alphabet. You also saw some crazy tables that presented some Korean syllables that we made by matching up Korean consonants and vowels. You may have noticed that this page is “wider” than a normal page here at HowtoStudyKorean. Why is it like this? Well, we have an even crazier table to show you in this lesson, and we need all the space we can get.

In this final lesson of Unit 0, you will learn the remaining vowels that you will need to be able to read Korean. Most of these letters are called “dipthongs” – which is just a fancy way of saying that there are two vowels in one. After learning these final letters, you will be able to apply these letters to words and start learning simple sentences and grammatical formations.

Luckily, all of the letters you will learn in this lesson are based off vowels that you have already studied. You should remember these letters from before:

ㅏ = a
ㅓ = eo
ㅜ = u
ㅗ = o

There are four more vowels that we can make by adding one extra line to each of the previous vowels. By adding this extra line, a ‘Y’ sound gets added to each vowel:

ㅑ = ya
ㅕ = yeo
ㅠ = yu
ㅛ = yo

If we were to make some syllables with these new vowels, they would look like this:
약 = yak
역 = yeok
육 = yuk
욕 = yok

Two more common vowels are:

ㅐ = ae (a combination of ㅏ and ㅣ)
ㅔ = e  (a combination of ㅓ and ㅣ)

Though these two vowels have different Romanizations, they sound identical to one another. They both sound like “eigh” in “weigh”

Officially (and historically), the pronunciation of ㅐ is different than ㅔ. Ask a Korean to pronounce them for you, and you will hear two identical sounds. Ask a Korean person if there is a difference in their sounds, they will say that they sound identical. Ask a Korean language teacher to pronounce them, and you will hear two identical sounds. Ask a Korean language teacher if there is a difference in their sounds, they will say that a long time ago there used to be a distinction between the two, but this has disappeared from contemporary Korean pronunciation. For all practical purposes, especially for a foreigner learning Korean, the sounds are identical.

If we were to make syllables with these new letters, they would look like this:

배 = bae (sounds like bay)
베 = be  (also sounds like bay)

Here is an audio file with a Korean person pronouncing “ㅐ” with starting consonants:
애, 배, 재, 대, 개, 새, 매, 내, 해, 래

Here is an audio file with a Korean pronouncing “ㅔ” with starting consonants:
에, 베, 제, 데, 게, 세, 메, 네, 헤, 레
(Yes, it’s exactly the same file. As I said, ㅐ and ㅔ sound exactly the same).

The remaining vowels to study are all composed of adding two vowels together to make a sound. The pronunciation for each of these is simply the sound of putting the two vowels together. For example:

ㅜ + ㅣ = ㅟ = wi (example: 쥐)
위, 뷔, 쥐, 뒤, 귀, 쉬, 뉘

ㅜ + ㅓ = ㅝ = wo (example: 원)
워, 붜, 줘, 둬, 궈, 숴, 눠

ㅗ + ㅣ = ㅚ = oe  (sounds like “way”) (example: 외국 = waygook)
외, 뵈, 죄, 되, 괴, 쇠, 뇌

ㅗ + ㅏ = ㅘ = wa (example: 완)

와, 봐, 좌, 돠, 과, 솨, 놔

ㅡ + ㅣ = ㅢ = ui (example: 의)
의, 븨, 즤, 듸, 긔, 싀, 늬

Aside from “의,” you would rarely, if ever, hear those syllables in Korean. I showed them to my wife to record, and she couldn’t even wrap her head around how to pronounce the syllables “븨, 즤, 듸, 긔, 싀, 늬.” You can hear this in the recording, and also hear her laugh a little bit at the end. 

ㅕ + ㅣ = ㅖ = ye (예)
예, 계, 혜
(I removed the other examples, such as “셰, 졔, 볘,” etc… because you wouldn’t hear them very often. You are 1000 times more likely to hear the syllables that I recorded over the ones I omitted)

Come back Lesson 2