I've been learning Korean, I recently found out that it is a language that was invented rather than evolving over time. It was created with the intention to be easy to learn. The entire alphabet is 24 characters, whereas Japanese has over 500 and Mandarin has a few thousand.
Each of the 24 characters follow very logical rules and build onto each other to build "blocks" of syllables. Each block must start with a consonant in the top-left, always followed by a vowel, and sometimes ends with a consonant. So the block always reads left-right, top-bottom and must always contain at least one consonant and vowel.
In addition, each syllable block has a phonetic sound. This means that it's really easy to read and pronounce, since there are no silent letters, with the one exception of single vowel syllable blocks. Which must start with a silent ㅇ(ng), for example the character ㅣ(i). So following the rule of a syllable block needing to start with a consonant you can't have a single ㅣ since it's a vowel, so you need to use ㅇ as a placeholder, thus creating ㅇㅣ(i).
Now if you want to create a word, like "child". You can put together the character ㅏ(a) and ㅣ(i). Since you can't have two vowels in the same block, we must use two blocks to create the word. This gives us ㅇㅏㅇㅣ (a-i).
The vowels consist entirely of horizontal and vertical lines, with a dash or double dash off to the left, right, top, or bottom. It's a very simple alphabet and an extremely interesting language. If anyone want's to learn more, feel free to checkout the Wiki page on Hangul for the full set of vowels, consonants, and double consonants. It's often said you can learn the Hangul alphabet in 90 minutes. If you want a solid intro course to Hangul, checkout this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5aobqyEaMQ
Each of the 24 characters follow very logical rules and build onto each other to build "blocks" of syllables. Each block must start with a consonant in the top-left, always followed by a vowel, and sometimes ends with a consonant. So the block always reads left-right, top-bottom and must always contain at least one consonant and vowel.
In addition, each syllable block has a phonetic sound. This means that it's really easy to read and pronounce, since there are no silent letters, with the one exception of single vowel syllable blocks. Which must start with a silent ㅇ(ng), for example the character ㅣ(i). So following the rule of a syllable block needing to start with a consonant you can't have a single ㅣ since it's a vowel, so you need to use ㅇ as a placeholder, thus creating ㅇㅣ(i).
Now if you want to create a word, like "child". You can put together the character ㅏ(a) and ㅣ(i). Since you can't have two vowels in the same block, we must use two blocks to create the word. This gives us ㅇㅏㅇㅣ (a-i).
The vowels consist entirely of horizontal and vertical lines, with a dash or double dash off to the left, right, top, or bottom. It's a very simple alphabet and an extremely interesting language. If anyone want's to learn more, feel free to checkout the Wiki page on Hangul for the full set of vowels, consonants, and double consonants. It's often said you can learn the Hangul alphabet in 90 minutes. If you want a solid intro course to Hangul, checkout this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5aobqyEaMQ