Before Hangul: Writing Korean with Chinese Characters

A language without its own letters

People on the Korean Peninsula have spoken their language for a very long time. They sang songs, told stories, made laws and traded goods, all in Korean. But for most of that history, there was a big problem: there were no letters made for Korean.

When people wanted to write, they used Chinese characters. In Korean we call them 한자. Writing in the classical Chinese style is called 한문. For more than a thousand years, 한자 and 한문 were the main way to write in Korea, in government, in schools, in temples and in family records.

This was not because Koreans did not care about their own language. Chinese characters were simply the writing system that was used across East Asia at the time. Books of history, philosophy, medicine and religion were written in it. Learning 한문 opened the door to all of this knowledge.

So many characters, so little time

Chinese characters are not like an alphabet. Each character usually stands for a meaning, not just a sound. To read ordinary books, a person needed to know several thousand characters. Learning them took many years of study.

Who had that much time? Mostly the families of the noble scholar class, called 양반, and people who worked in government, temples or special offices. Farmers, fishermen, servants and most women did not have the chance to study for years. So most ordinary people, the 백성, could not read or write.

This caused real problems in daily life. If a farmer could not read a notice from the government, he did not know the new rules. If someone was treated unfairly, it was hard to write a complaint to an official. Knowledge stayed in the hands of a small group.

이두: the language of offices

이두 was used for many centuries in documents such as reports, contracts and legal papers. Clerks in government offices knew it well. A text in 이두 looked like Chinese at first, but a trained reader could see Korean grammar hiding inside it.

It was useful, but it was still hard. You needed to know Chinese characters first, and then you needed to learn the special 이두 rules on top of that.

향찰: writing songs in Korean

In the old kingdom of Silla, people sang poems called 향가. Some of these were written down in 향찰. This system tried to write a whole song in the Korean language, line by line.

Today, scholars still discuss how to read some of these songs, because we cannot always be sure which character was used for meaning and which for sound. That tells you how tricky this system was. Only a small number of these songs have survived.

구결: little helpers for readers

Students who read Chinese classics often added small notes between the lines. These notes, called 구결, showed where the Korean endings should go when the text was read aloud. Over time, people even used shortened shapes of characters to write these notes more quickly.

구결 helped readers, but it did not help people who could not read Chinese characters at all.

What this means for you as a learner

Even today, Korean has many words that came from Chinese characters. Words like 학교 (school), 한국 (Korea) and 문자 (writing system) all have roots in 한자. If you study Korean for a long time, you will notice these roots and they will help you guess new words.

But you do not need to learn 한자 to read Korean today. Thanks to Hangul, you can read every Korean word with just 24 letters. That is the gift that this story leads to.