Since you get to see it in the title and it's a short, simple word, I thought I'd use the title to show those of you who aren't familiar a little about the Korean writing system called Hangul. Unlike Chinese, Korean characters are just simple combinations of letters, like our own alphabet, however the letters are drawn together into a "character" that represents a syllable, rather that written out in horizontal strings like our words. So a typical Korean name that has two syllables would be two characters e.g. Jong-nam = 종 남 and Suk-hyun = 석 현 but in those particular names, coincidentally, each syllable has 3 letters... Check out the handy dandy drawing I made further down in the post, it should help!

So back to the title. Seoul is a two syllable word, Seo-ul.

The first syllable ("Seo") is a consonant ("S") followed by a vowel ("eo") (sounds kinda like 'aw' or 'uh').

The second syllable ("ul") begins with a vowel "u" (oo) followed by a consonant. It is important to note that it begins with a vowel because that effects how we draw it.

So, a Korean "S" = "ㅅ" is combined with the vowel sound "eo" "ㅓ" and you get "Seo" = 서. I won't go heavy into the drawing rules but since the vowel is more vertical (the vertical line is longer and the horizontal line is short) it goes to the right of the consonant.

Ok, the second syllable starts with a vowel. In writing Korean, if the sound of the character starts with a vowel the Hangul character is drawn with a silent placeholder letter which looks like a circle = "ㅇ" and then the letter of the vowel. So just the character "u" (oo) would have the silent letter and then the vowel for "u" which looks like this: ㅜ. ㅜ is more horizontal so it goes BELOW the silent consonant. 우 = "u".

To add the "l" we just add the "ㄹ" letter underneath the "u". 울. So "ul" (sounds like "ool") is the silent placeholder with the "u" vowel underneath it and the "l" consonant underneath that!. One character, one syllable, two sounds (oo and l), three "letters."
 

Just as an aside, to make things more confusing, the placeholder letter "ㅇ" is silent at the beginning of a character but if it is written at the end it makes the sound "ng" (Like the "Jong" in Jongnam.

Thanks Lucas. I just recieved the Rosetta Stone systems for learning languages-I got Korean. It is lots of fun...Thanks for your lesson.

Thanks, Lucas and Karma for your work.

I want to say "Thank you Teacher" which I know how to say in Korean but not how to spell.

Thank you for the lesson. Question... what does the Korean computer key board look like as compared to a Chinese or Japanese one?

Nancy wrote:

Thank you for the lesson. Question... what does the Korean computer key board look like as compared to a Chinese or Japanese one?

Well, I got curious and found this really neat one