More Vowels

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

ㅗ, pronounced like the o in oh!

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

문, meanig door, is pronounced mun with a long u.

Letter-stacking rule: vowels that are "vertical", like ㅏ, go to the right of the first consonant in your syllable. Vowels that are "horizontal", like ㅗ, 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!

Here is a word that has both horizontal and vertical vowels in it, with the square boxes shown: 누나, meaning elder sister, is pronounced nu-na.

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

Stacking Syllables

Table of Contents

Decoding a Word