110 Cultural Post #4

[Stephen Huffnagle]

Korean has a pretty intricate alphabet. There are about 10ish basic consonants and vowels, and they combine in order to form complex words and sentences like in English. There are certain characters that have no sound, while there are others that have different sounds given the context. Many characters are borrowed from Mandarin, so there are apparently a lot of cognates between the two languages. All in all, it's a pretty hard writing system for English speakers to understand, because there are some sounds that do not exist in the English language that we have to cope with.