Prior to 1446, Korea did not have a writing language of their own. Those who were from the elite class, wrote in hanja, classical Chinese characters in order to record the meaning of the Korean words that were spoken. King Sejong, Sejong the Great, said that using Chinese characters for Korean was “like trying to fit a square handle into a round hole”. King Sejong, who was upset that his citizens could not express their concerns to him, developed 28 new letters, so that his people can learn how to use the letters easily and for daily use. It was initially known as Hunmin Jeongeum (“proper sounds for instructing the people”).
The way in which Korean is written is different from most writing systems, despite it being an alphabet, the letters are not written linearly. They are grouped into syllable blocks. Example is for the word hangul: h-a-n-g-u-l regularly would look like this ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ but instead it is this 한글 [han-gul]. There are 3 different “sets” of consonants:
ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, ㅈ (romanised as k, t, p, ch)
ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, ㅊ (romanised as k’, t’, p’, ch’)
ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ, ㅉ (romanised as kk, tt, pp, ss, tch)
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