Han Gul
As an idle musing when I was chatting to one of the senior black belts at the black belt pregrading on the 17th of this month, I asked whether Korean was written like Chinese or Japanese. She didn’t know, but I had a little free time on my hands today so I thought I should satisfy my curiosity and find out!
Korean is written with characters called Hangul, which are written from left to right just like English. Surprisingly, there is an alphabet consisting of just 19 consonants and 21 vowels, many of which are minor variations of each other. No ideograms with one symbol per word 
Better yet, I was amazed to discover that words are written phonetically by building syllables composed of
two or three letters arranged in little boxes… no where near as complicated as I had expected.
Here is an interesting site that offers a short introduction to Hangul, by J. David Eisenberg (author of the O’Reilly SVG book :-/)
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