What surprised me about the Korean writing system was that it is really different from the Japanese writing system. Hangeul, the Korean writing system, doesn't use characters like Japanese hiragana, katakana and kanji (I've studied Japanese before and am familiar with its writing system). Hangeul includes a set of 'symbols' that represents a specific sound. These symbols are combined to make a syllable or character. In Japanese, each symbol represents a syllable, so I thought Hangeul was unique in that aspect. For me, Hangeul is harder to read and write because figuring out how to combine the pieces to make a part of the word is a huge extra step that slows me down. Still, I prefer Hangeul more than Japanese because I absolutely hated learning kanji (Chinese characters).
One thing I've heard several times about learning Hangeul (and other writing systems as well) is to not translate the written Korean words into romanized letters. People might feel that this is helpful when learning, but I think it actually isn't the proper way of learning another written language. Since I'm learning Korean, a language that is completely different from English, it's natural to want to learn this way, but it doesn't help you to understand the written language if you're only translating back and forth.
Sometimes Korean isn't pronounced the way it is written. Some letter sounds alternate depending on the word. It's hard to distinguish 'p' and 'b' sometimes because it sounds the same. That's why translating the written language is bad. For example, Busan (a South Korean city) is actually pronounced like "Pusan," the 'b' actually makes a soft 'p' sound. However, it depends sometimes. The word "babo" (it means idiot) is actually pronounced "pabo." In this case, the first 'b' makes a soft 'p' sound, but the second 'b' is just pronounced as a 'b.' Inconvenient, no?
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