The King's Letters

Let's learn to write Korean, too!

I mean, the movie makes it look like the easiest language to learn, right? The main side-effect of running a math program for five years is that my kids love a logic puzzle. How few letters can you have in an alphabet? How few shapes can you use to make those letters? Can you make all of the vowels all of the ways with just dots? A whole movie about those logic problems, combinatorics and the politics involved? Yep. No problem. We were all riveted.

I was going to exclude any reading or writing from this month. I love the way the language looks, but was content to have some cute pictures of kids in front of words we didn’t understand.

Now that I know that Hangul has only 24 basic letters, and that they have a shape that tells you what part of your body the sound comes from, I think is probably useful and possible to learn at least a few letters.

This movie confirmed a suspicion I had: movies that take place in some ancient place are interesting mostly because of the clothing. No need for fancy fighting. They can paint letters over and over again, as long as they look like this:

I hope parts of Korea still look like this and that we get to see them.