Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes, with a comic

Source: ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com

Artist and traveller Ryan Estrada recently created a comic that claims to teach readers how to read the Korean alphabet – known to Koreans as Hangul – in around 15 minutes. Obviously practice will help you remember what you’ve learned, but the basis for the ease of learning is that Korean’s alphabet is actually extremely simple.

Though users of the Roman alphabet tend to freak out when they see a different writing system – for example Chinese characters, Thai script, or the Cyrillic alphabet – the Korean alphabet has one thing other writing systems don’t: 100% logic.

As opposed to every other writing system, the Korean alphabet was thought up by a single person, who had simplicity in mind. Thanks to this, the Korean alphabet is not only simple and logical, but is very regular: that is to say, if you know that a character is pronounced a certain way, you know that it will always be pronounced that way.

Head over to Ryan Estrada’s Tumblr page to read the comic. Of course, being able to read Korean doesn’t mean you can understand what any of it says, but for those of us interested in learning different alphabets it’s a great find.