By Strang Burton and Stanley Nam

Introduction

In the 15th century, King Sejong the Great of Korea decided to reform Korean writing.

Up until that time, Koreans had used Chinese characters—sometimes writing in Chinese, other times re-purposing the Chinese characters to represent Korean words and sounds. Either way, learning to read and write in Korea before Sejong meant years of work mastering thousands of characters.

But Sejong wanted something better. Specifically, he wanted a system of symbols so simple that “a wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over, and a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.” And he got it!

The resulting alphabet, which Sejong and a royal think-tank put together from scratch, is called hangul—and it is one of the simplest and most elegantly designed writing systems ever created.

The rest of this post is a short introduction to the hangul system. It won’t teach you the full system, but it will lead you through some examples that illustrate how hangul works, followed by some discussion of the underlying design features that make it such a uniquely effective writing system.

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