The
Korean word for their
language is "
hangookeo". The
written language, called
hangul is pretty much
phonetic, and very
easy to learn. I was capable of reading
Korean characters within a week of coming to
South Korea.
Westerners find the pronunciation somewhat difficult, as the sounds of many of their letters are halfway between two English letters. The vowels in particular are rather tricky. The romanization varies depending on who you ask, but if I had to write, in English, the vowel sounds that exist in Korean, I would write them as: "ah", "yah", "oeuh" (almost like the "aw" in "law", but with a bit of an "euh" sound... this is easily the hardest vowel for me to pronounce), "yoeuh", "oh", "yo", "oo", "yoo", "ee", "uh" and two different ones that both sound like "ae" to me.
Since I mentioned the vowels, I might as well talk about the consonants. The consonant sounds available in Korean are: something halfway between "g" and "k"; a hard "k"; "n"; halfway between "s" and "sh"; halfway between "b" and "p"; "p"; "ng"; "j"; "ch"; "m"; "d"; "t"; halfway between "r" and "l"; and "h".
It's worth noting that it is impossible to have two consecutive consonants within a single character in Korean. This is why Koreans often put extraneous vowels into their English speech, often resulting in extra syllables. For instance, my name, Alex, when spoken in Korean, becomes "Ahl-laek-suh," since it isn't possible to finish the word with the "ks" sound (represented by "x").