Reading · how the writing works
One alphabet, in blocks.
Korean looks like it is written in characters, and it is not. It is an alphabet of 24 basic letters, designed in the 1440s to be easy to learn, with the letters of each syllable packed into a square. Here is how it works, and where it came from.
Korean is written with Hangul, an alphabet. It looks like a set of characters because the letters of each syllable are stacked into a square, but underneath every block is a few letters you can learn in an afternoon.
An alphabet of 24 basic letters: 14 consonants and 10 vowels, plus doubled consonants and combined vowels built from them. One letter, one sound, mostly.
The letters of each syllable are packed into one square block. The block, not the letter, is what you see on the page, which is why Korean looks like characters when it is really spelled out.
Chinese characters. A large share of Korean vocabulary came from Chinese, but in South Korea today Hanja appear only in names, some newspapers and legal texts. Not something to learn first.
That says “I drink coffee.” Written normally: 저는 커피를 마셔요.
Unlike Japanese or Chinese, Korean puts spaces between words, so a sentence is easy to split up. What you have to learn is that the small endings, the particles, attach to the word before them: 는 marks what you are talking about and 를 marks what the verb acts on. The verb comes last.
Learn the letters first, then how blocks fit together, then start the daily lessons. That is a few days' work, not a few months'.
A short history of Hangul
Used for: everything. Every Korean word, name, sign and message is written in Hangul.
Until the fifteenth century Korean had no script of its own. People who could write wrote in Classical Chinese, a foreign language with a foreign grammar, and learning it took years that most people did not have. King Sejong, who ruled from 1418, set out to change that, and in 1443 he and scholars at his court finished a new alphabet designed for Korean from the ground up.
It was published in 1446 with a book explaining the design, and the design is the remarkable part. The basic consonants are drawings of the mouth making the sound: ㄱ is the back of the tongue raised towards the soft palate, ㄴ is the tip of the tongue at the ridge behind the teeth, ㅁ is the closed lips, ㅅ is a tooth, ㅇ is the open throat. Related sounds add a stroke to the same shape, so ㄱ becomes ㅋ, ㄴ becomes ㄷ and then ㅌ. The vowels are built from a dot for the heavens, a flat line for the earth and an upright line for a person.
That is why Hangul is quick to learn. The shapes are not arbitrary, so they are easy to keep apart, and a letter's family resemblance tells you something about its sound. It is also why the letters are packed into syllable blocks: the court wanted the new writing to sit comfortably alongside Chinese characters, which are square.
It was not welcomed by everyone. Scholars who had spent their lives on Chinese saw little need for it, and in 1504 a king banned it altogether after critics used it to write posters against him. It survived in letters, novels and popular writing, and was finally made the basis of official documents in 1894. The name Hangul, often explained as great script or one script, dates from the early twentieth century.