Are you familiar with the Korean alphabet? Though the language is not widely spoken outside of North and South Korea, it has risen in popularity in recent years among American students, currently representing the fifth most commonly studied language. You might look at all the foreign symbols on the menu at our Bellevue Korean restaurant and find them intimidating, but it’s actually quite a practical alphabet.

The Korean alphabet, known as hangul, is not nearly as complicated as it looks. Unlike the Chinese alphabet, which requires you to learn thousands of letters in order to read a common newspaper, hangul is a phonetic system with twenty-four symbols. These symbols, logically organized into fourteen simple consonants and ten vowels, are combined to form symbols that each represent one syllable. This alphabet is celebrated as one of the most practical linguistic forms in the world, and a triumph of Korean ingenuity.