My lecturer said that "If you want to learn Korean Language, you must learn the Korean alphabets first. Because Hangul's sound cannot be romanized.". Now lets learn the 10 basic vowels of Korean Alphabets, Hangul.
In the creation of the description of the vowel, King Sejong had applied East Asian philosophy of divination, a belief which existence are all in Yin and Yang system. And sound is no exception. There is brightness and darkness in sound. In order to represent this principle into vowel description, three basic shape were created in the image of the sky ( . ), land ( - ) and man ( | ) and it expresses many aspects of the sounds in unique way. As time passed, the dot changed iinto dash shape because the dot hardly recognized in the character. There are 10 basic vowels and 11 complex vowels that Korean used now. The followings are the basic vowels taht is in alphabetical order.
When writing the basic vowels, we need to write it with a consonant called yieung (
ㅇ ). The vowels will look like these.