The Korean people have a long history of valuing education. The Great King SaeJong recognized that HanJa was a barrier to literacy for many in the working class. They lacked the education, resources, and time required to memorize thousands of HanJa characters. He developed a simple form of writing called “HanGul” (Korean Writing) to solve this problem.

HanGul is simple, scientific, and phonetic. It is made up of 24 simple characters that represent sounds. They can be combined into compound letters to make up all 40 sounds used in the Korean language.

Sometimes it is useful for foreigners to attempt to write Korean words with English letters. This is called Romanization. There are several standard Romanization methods that can be used to represent Korean words in English. The standard adopted by the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism in the year 2000 is the Revised Romanization method. The sounds of the Korean language are not identical to the sounds of the English language, so no Romanization method will be perfect. This book does not strictly adhere to the standard methods in an attempt to write the English form of words that is most likely to result in a non-Korean speaker pronouncing the word correctly.

A serious study of the Korean language should start with memorization of the HanGul letters in Tables 1.3 – 1.4 and their correct pronunciations. However, genealogy can be interpreted without memorization by using these tables a reference.

Table 1.3:  HanGul Consonant Letters

Table 1.4: HanGul Vowel Letters