Survival Korean

Romanization

Most linguists agree that the Korean alphabet is the most scientific and systematic among all alphabets of the world. It was created in the first half of the 15th Century by a group of scholars with rigorous linguistic analysis of the Korean language. Each of the 40 or so characters  has a one-to-one correspondence with the set of Korean sounds. However, the Romanization of Hangeul in 2000 (2000 system) does not follow the phonemic system. The 2000 system adopts a phonetic representation which allows more than one letter for one phoneme. For example, ‘ㄱ’ is written as ‘g’ at syllable initial, as ‘k’ at syllable final, and as ‘ng’ before a nasal. This guidebook reluctantly accepted the current standard with one addition: . to demarcate a vowel from its preceding vowel or consonant as gwang.yang. Here are the examples:

Consonants 자음

In addition to the above list, we have ten more double consonants, which are pronounced in different ways depending on the context: ns (넋), nj (앉), lg (밝, 밝아), bs (값, 값이), lg (옳고, 옳아), lm (옮), lb (얇), ng (않), lt (훑고, 훑어), and lp (읊고, 읊어).

Vowels 모음

The list of Korean phrases given here was extracted from www.lifeinkorea.com and revised with the above principles in consideration.