KONGLE
Level 0 · Unit 1 · Vowels · 5 min

Basic Vowels 1: ㅏ ㅓ ㅗ ㅜ

Read and pronounce the four basic vowels ㅏ, ㅓ, ㅗ, ㅜ and recognize them in real words.

  1. Letter 1 of 4
    ㅏ
    아 a

    A vertical line with a branch pointing right — sounds like 'a' in father.

    아이 ai child

Say it out loud

우유 uyu milk

Listen, then repeat aloud. Matching the rhythm matters more than perfection.

Why? Hangul vowels are built from three elements

Every Hangul vowel is drawn from just three strokes: a dot (sky), a horizontal line (earth), and a vertical line (person). Today's four vowels are the most common ones — learn these and you can already read parts of real Korean words. One thing you'll notice immediately: a vowel never stands alone on the page. Korean writes a circle — ㅇ — in front of it, and at the start of a syllable that circle is completely silent. It only fills the consonant slot, which is why the vowel ㅏ is written 아. You'll meet ㅇ properly in Unit 2. For now: see the circle, read just the vowel. One note on the English examples in this course: they follow Standard General American pronunciation. If you speak another variety of English, a few of the comparisons may land slightly differently. You'll also meet two vowels we haven't covered yet — the ㅣ in 아이 and the ㅠ in 우유. Both arrive in the next two lessons of this unit; for now, just read the letters you know.

Common questions

The word 아이 has a letter I haven't learned yet. Is that a mistake?

No — the second vowel ㅣ comes in Unit 2. We use real words from the very first lesson on purpose: a real word you can say to someone is worth more than a syllable that means nothing. Read it as 'a-i' for now.

Which English accent are the pronunciation comparisons based on?

Standard General American. It matters in a few places — for example ㄹ is compared to the 'tt' in butter, which is a tap in American English but not in British or Australian English. If your English is not American, use the Korean audio as the real reference and the English word only as a hint.

Check yourself

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