Learn Basic Korean Language

PART V

The Place Holder Consonant

A Hangul syllable block MUST begin with a consonant. So how do you write a block that starts with a vowel? There is a special silent placeholder letter that you can just ignore if it is the first letter:

Placeholder
        ㅇ

This same letter actually has a real sound if it is not the first letter in a block. But don't worry about that yet.

As you'll learn in the next section, all vowels have either a long vertical or horizontal line. If the line is horizontal then you draw the placeholder above the vowel. If the line is vertical the the placeholder is written to the left of the vowel:

Horizontal               Vertical
        으                               이

HANGUL VOWELS

Now let's learn some vowels. We will be showing you vowels with the Placeholder consonant you learned about in the last section. How many vowels does Korean have? It has 8 vowels that you will learn in this lesson plus 11 semi-vowels you will learn about later. Does that sound like a lot?

How many vowels does English have?
You may say 5 or 6 because in English vowels are written using only six letters: a, e, i, o, u and y. However that is just the number of letters used to write the vowels. In fact English uses between 11 and 20 different vowel sounds depending on the accent.

The vowel letters in English do a poor job of showing how to pronounce things. Look at these 3 words that are pronounced the same but spelled with different vowels: Bi, Buy and Bye.

And the letter "a" in these 3 words is pronounced differently: fate, father and apple

At least in Hangul each vowel gets its own letter.