Korean has 19 consonant phonemes, 8 vowel phonemes, and 12 diphthongs. For the most part, the letters in Hangul transfer pretty well to sounds that exist in English. Many of them are pronounced as a sound in-between two English letters, however. For example, there isn't really an "r" sound, but instead something in-between an "r" and an "l," which can be difficult to do. Also, there are a lot of Hangul letters that sound very similar to me, but are very distinguishable for native speakers. For example, there are different characters for a "j," "ch," and a double "j" sound, which are very hard to tell apart. Similarly, there are different characters for "b," "p," and double "b" sounds. This makes it difficult to spell words perfectly, even when you know how they're pronounced. Besides these distinctions, there aren't many sounds that are very difficult to pronounce for an English speaker, which makes learning how to read and speak easier than some other languages. A transcription of the word meaning "to go" is [kada], even though the letter used to spell it in Korean is the one that is supposed to translate as a "g" sound. Another example like this is the word for "fire" which is transcribed as [pul] even though it's spelled with the "b" letter in Korean. If I were to try to write this just by sound, I would probably use the Korean letter that translates as a "p" sound. However, if I were to this, I would accidentally be spelling the word for "grass," not "fire," which are obviously very different. That one is transcribed as [pʰul].
I was able to acquire the knowledge I needed to learn the structure of Korean through my online practice on Duolingo and with my language partner. It was pretty easy to learn the structure; the words are just broken up by syllable. I've been learning along the way about the grammatical structure of Korean, which is different than English. Learning the writing structure was a very important task for me, so I identified the materials I needed to learn this structure right away, because I couldn't move forward at all in my language learning before I knew the alphabet.
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