More Vowels

Are you tired of having only to work with? Would you like to buy some more vowels? Here are two more for free:

, pronounced like the o in oh!

, pronounced like the oo in moon. [The standard way of writing Korean using English letters, known as Romanization, uses the letter u to stand for this oo sound, and that's what we'll use from now on.]

Now we have to stack our consonants and vowels on top of each other if we wish to stay within the square box:

This syllable: is pronounced mok with a long o, and it's the word for neck or throat.

, meaning door, is pronounced mun with a long u.

Letter-stacking rule: vowels that are "vertical", like , go to the right of the first consonant in your syllable. Vowels that are "horizontal", like , go under the first consonant in your syllable. All of this is done to make sure that syllables fit into a square box.

Let's Go Crazy!

Let's look at a word that has both horizontal and vertical vowels in it: This word: , meaning elder sister, is pronounced nu-na.

Here's another word: . It means tree. Can you figure out how it's pronounced? (Answer on next page).

Stacking Syllables

Table of Contents

Decoding a Word