The Korean alphabet (called “Hangul” in Korean) was developed by a team of scholars under King Se-jong (1397-1450) of the Yi Dynasty and is the most recently invented and most scientifically designed alphabet in the world. “Hangul” has only 21 vowel/vowel combinations and 19 consonants, 5 of which are the same symbol repeated twice and 5 of them are simply a consonant with the addition of an accent mark. That makes a total of only 30 basic character shapes to be learned.
Due to western influence “Hangul” is often written from left to right and top to bottom like English, but can also be written from top to bottom and right to left like Chinese.
Each letter of the alphabet is a simple shape that represents a sound, (some characters change sounds or just have a harder sound depending on their location in the syllable). Example: The Korean letter “ㄱ” sounds like a G in the initial position in a syllable and like a K in the final position in a syllable as we can see in the word “국 Guk,”
http://www.korean-arts.com/about/korean%20alphabet.htm
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