Alphabets in October

안녕!

It is currently October, and my main focus for this month has been mastering the Korean alphabet, also known as Hangul (한글). This language is considered to be one of the easiest east Asian tongues to learn as it has very simple letters when compared to complicated-stroke consisting alphabets of Cantonese, Mandarin or even Japanese.

I find that for me, Korean is very easy to write because it has a similar order of syllables like Hindi does. Although Hangul has 24 letters in total including 14 letters and 10 consonants and Hindi has 11 vowels and 40 letters.

This month, I focused solely on mastering the alphabet. In Korean there are many vowels that sound alike and take practice to recognize instantly. So to understand the many letters, I wrote them out, then wrote the sound they produce, after matching it to a letter that sounded the same in Hindi. This made my life much easier than trying to remember many confusing similar sounding letters like T and D, which have the same letter (ㄷ).

A week after I could finally distinguish between the different letters, I moved on to double vowels, which were even more confusing. I had to really put in effort to understand these because they form the base of sound. If I misinterpreted a vowel, the whole meaning of the word could change. To overcome this obstacle, I listened to some online audio that came with my Integrated Korean Workbook.

In the last two weeks of October, I studied the end result: putting together the many consonants and vowels. I learnt how to write words! In this language, the alphabet goes from the left to the right and back to the left. So, 김, would spell Kim, a common Korean surname. The K or G on the top left is read first, then the I on the right and then the M in the bottom or right.

This means "Mirror"

This means "Door"

In addition, I also started learning vocabulary for everyday things in my house. At first, it was hard remembering everything, so I started putting up post it (yes, my ramen ones) notes on objects.

Other than that, I've also added a Korean keyboard to my laptop and I also use this extension in case I need to type up some hangul.

Well, that's all I have for October 시월!

PSA- I APOLOGIZE FOR MY UGLY NOTES ITS MY FIRST TIME TRYING A JOURNAL SPREAD SO PLS DONT ROAST ME THX

안녕 for now!