Korean Alphabet to English: Romanization Chart and Reading Rules
Romanization — writing Korean with English letters — is messier than it looks. There are three competing systems, and the official one changes a letter's spelling based on where it sits in a syllable. Here's the chart, the sound-change rules, and why Koreans themselves barely use any of this.
Romanization — writing Korean with English letters — is messier than it looks. There are three competing systems, and the official one changes a letter's spelling based on where it sits in a syllable. Here's the chart, the sound-change rules, and why Koreans themselves barely...
Writing Korean in English letters is called 로마자 표기법 (romaja pyogibeop) — literally "Roman letter notation." South Korea's official system is the Revised Romanization of Korean, rolled out in 2000, and it's what you'll see on road signs and subway maps across the country.
But here's the honest thing nobody says upfront: romanization is messy, imperfect, and Koreans mostly don't use it among themselves. You use it on road signs for tourists. You use it when an English keyboard is all you've got. Otherwise, Koreans read and write in Hangul. Full stop.
A quick warning before the chart. There are actually three romanization systems you'll encounter, and they disagree with each other in confusing ways.
The three systems
1. Revised Romanization (2000) — the official current system. Used on signage and most modern resources. It's the one this post uses.
2. McCune-Reischauer (1937) — the older academic system. Still used in a lot of older textbooks and by some universities. It uses apostrophes and breve marks that Revised Romanization got rid of.
3. Yale Romanization (1942) — used mostly in linguistics papers. You basically only encounter this if you're studying Korean academically.
The confusion point: the same Korean word can have different spellings depending on which system you grew up with. The Korean city 부산 is "Busan" in Revised, "Pusan" in McCune-Reischauer. Same city, same pronunciation, different spelling. That's why you'll see old cookbooks say "kimchee" while Revised says "kimchi."
For everything below I'm sticking with Revised Romanization because it's the standard now.
The Korean-to-English chart
Consonants (at the start of a syllable):
Double consonants: ㄲ kk · ㄸ tt · ㅃ pp · ㅆ ss · ㅉ jj
Vowels:
- ㅏ a, ㅑ ya, ㅓ eo, ㅕ yeo
- ㅗ o, ㅛ yo, ㅜ u, ㅠ yu
- ㅡ eu, ㅣ i
- ㅐ ae, ㅒ yae, ㅔ e, ㅖ ye
- ㅘ wa, ㅙ wae, ㅚ oe, ㅝ wo, ㅞ we, ㅟ wi, ㅢ ui
So far, so simple. This is the part beginners latch onto. Letter in, letter out.
The four sound-change rules that mess everything up
Korean letters romanize differently depending on where they sit in a 음절 (eumjeol, syllable). This is where romanization stops being a lookup table and starts being a small puzzle.
Rule 1: ㄱ / ㄷ / ㅂ / ㅈ flip their romanization when they're the 받침.
The batchim is the final consonant in a syllable — the one at the bottom of the block. When ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, or ㅈ appears as batchim, it romanizes as k/t/p/ch instead of g/d/b/j.
- 밥 = "bap" (final ㅂ → p, not b)
- 부엌 = "bueok" (final ㅋ is k)
- 낮 = "nat" (final ㅈ → t)
Rule 2: ㄹ changes from r to l when it's the batchim.
- 물 = "mul" (water — final ㄹ → l)
- 라면 = "ramyeon" (start of syllable → r)
This is why Korean words spelled with "l" at the end look a little weird to learners who drilled "ㄹ = r." Both are right.
Rule 3: ㅇ is silent at the start, pronounced "ng" at the end.
- 아이 = "ai" (child — initial ㅇ is a placeholder)
- 강 = "gang" (river — final ㅇ is ng)
The initial ㅇ is basically a spelling convention. Every Korean syllable needs to start with a consonant letter, so when a syllable starts with a vowel sound, ㅇ sits there silently.
Rule 4: Connected consonants assimilate across syllable boundaries.
When you write it out, 한국 ("hanguk") has the ㄱ at the start of 국 staying as "g" — giving hanguk. But in 학교 ("hakgyo"), the ㄱ after the ㄱ-batchim tenses up into a harder consonant cluster. This is why you hear some Korean words pronounced differently from what a pure letter-by-letter reading would suggest.
This rule has a lot of edge cases. Don't try to memorize it — let your ear pick it up.
A worked example
Let's romanize 안녕하세요 — the standard polite hello.
- 안 = ㅇ + ㅏ + ㄴ = "an"
- 녕 = ㄴ + ㅕ + ㅇ = "nyeong"
- 하 = ㅎ + ㅏ = "ha"
- 세 = ㅅ + ㅔ = "se"
- 요 = ㅇ + ㅛ = "yo"
Stitch it together: annyeonghaseyo. Every rule in this post shows up in that one word.
Why Koreans barely use romanization among themselves
A thing I didn't understand for a long time: Koreans just don't use romanization in day-to-day life. Texts between friends are in Hangul. Menus in non-touristy neighborhoods are in Hangul. Social media captions are in Hangul.
Romanization is mainly for:
- Street signs and subway maps (for tourists)
- Entering Korean into a system that can't display Hangul
- Academic papers written in English
- Names on passports
That's why the same K-pop star's name can have three different English spellings across three websites. There's no single "correct" romanization of most names; the person picks what they like when they get their passport.
So if you're learning Korean for real, use romanization as training wheels for the first two weeks while you learn Hangul. Then ditch it. Trying to read Korean through romanization long-term will hold your pronunciation back. I did this for four months and my 받침 were all wrong when I finally weaned off.
FAQ
Why is kimchi spelled "kimchee" in some places? Older romanization conventions (mostly McCune-Reischauer) added an extra "e" to represent the ㅣ sound. Revised Romanization just uses "i." So 김치 = kimchi in the current system. Both refer to the same fermented cabbage.
Should I learn to type Korean in romanization? Only briefly. Korean keyboards use a Hangul layout, not romanization. Switching to the Korean layout is the actual skill to learn — it only takes about an hour.
Why does the official chart not match what I hear? Because the chart shows spelling rules, not phonetics. Spoken Korean has assimilation, liaison, and tone shifts that a spelling chart can't capture. If you need IPA, use a pronunciation dictionary.
Is the batchim concept hard? The idea is simple. Memorizing all its edge-case behaviors is what takes time. Start with the four rules above and you'll cover most real words.
Related on Korean TokTok
Quick cheat sheet
Expressions in this post
