한글 a Day

I promise to learn new 한극 word or phrase a day.  I am about to get my 3rd Korean reference book and I really would like to improve my Hangul.  I have started with this craze the day I started with this blog.  I have learned so many words by just listening to Korean music, watching movies or dramas and thorugh my language exchange partners.   I have my books as reference in confirming some of the words. 

One practical thing that I learned in understanding 한글 is that the characters represents a syllable of a word or sometimes its the word itself.  The word is spelled as they sound.  Each block (square like formation) contains at least two characters or maximum of four.  Like the word Hangul:

ㅎ(h) + ㅏ(a) +  ㄴ(n)  and ㄱ (g) + ㅡ (u) + ㄹ (l)

Similar to the complexity of English spelling and pronunciation, I know I have such hardships as well in improving on this language.  I wish to have the same determination until I reached my desired fluency. 

One of the first words I learned is the usual greetings, unlike in English there are several ways to greet a person.  The greetings usually depends on the time of the day and there is just the simple hi and hello.  Well in Korea this is how they greet each other:

안녕하세요  pronounced as An-nyeong-ha-se-yo.  If you want to say hi, hello, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, this is the right greetings.  It is also used to say ‘how are you?’ to frequently encountered people.  There is s separate ‘how are you?’ for a person that you just met for the 1st time or have met after a long time.  

I also learned how to say goodbye trough reading.  There are two ways to say goodbye:

안녕히 계세요    an-nyeong-hi   kye-se-yo  said to someone who will be staying. 

안녕히 가세요    an-nyeong-hi   ka-se-yo  said to someone who will be leaving.

The word for the day its 사랑 (sa-rang) which means love.