The shape of 서울

You already say Seoul and Gangnam. By the end of today you will be able to write them — 서울, 강남 — and read them off a platform sign.

This course has one advantage no other has: every public sign in Korea is bilingual. You read the Korean, you look down, and the romanisation tells you whether you were right. That is a free correction, dozens of times a day.

English writes letters in a line: s-e-o-u-l. Korean stacks the letters of one syllable into one square block.

So 서울 is not five letters. It is two syllables, each drawn in its own square: