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Led by King Sejong the Great Simulacrum
The first unit of the GCSE Korean. The script taught by the king who designed it. Three modules — articulatory iconicity (why each letter earns its shape), syllable-block construction and first reading, and the systematic gap between Korean spelling and surface speech. Text-only by design — phonology taught as a fact about the language, never as oral production. Reading and writing only.
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Led by King Sejong the Great Simulacrum
The question
Sejong opens with the *Hunminjeongeum* of 1443 and the doctrine of iconicity: that every Hangul letter earns its shape from the articulation it records. ㄱ traces the back of the tongue closing against the soft palate; ㄴ traces the tongue tip at the alveolar ridge; ㅁ traces the closed lips; ㅅ traces the airflow narrowing between the teeth; ㅇ traces the open, unobstructed throat. The other consonants are not new shapes but feature-modifications of these five — aspiration adds a stroke, tensing doubles. The vowels are constructed from three primitives — ㆍ heaven (round), ㅡ earth (flat), ㅣ human (upright) — and every other vowel is a principled composition. The student reads articulation off the letterform, the way a Joseon scholar of the Hall of Worthies would.
Outcome
The student can write out, in their own words, the articulatory fact each Hangul letter encodes; can apply the feature-derivation principle independently across consonant series; and can construct any composite vowel from the three primitives.
Sub-units
Led by King Sejong the Great Simulacrum
The question
Choe Sejin opens with the syllable as architectural unit. A Korean syllable is a block: an onset on the left or top, a nucleus to its right or below, and optionally a coda underneath. 가 is open; 각 is closed by a coda ㄱ. Tall vowels (ㅏ ㅓ ㅣ) take onset to the left; flat vowels (ㅗ ㅜ ㅡ) take onset above. Codas can be written with up to two consonants but only one is realised at the surface — the seven-coda neutralisation rule. The student constructs syllable blocks from scratch, reads first words from Choe Sejin's 노걸대 phrasebook, and locates the major particles (은/는, 이/가, 을/를) by sight before knowing what they do.
Outcome
The student can construct any Hangul syllable block from scratch with correct geometric arrangement, read common Korean words from the page without prompting, and identify onset, nucleus, and coda in any given block.
Sub-units
Led by King Sejong the Great Simulacrum
The question
Magister Simulacrum opens with the systematic gap between Korean spelling and surface speech. When a Korean reader sees 학교, what they expect a fluent speaker to produce is [학꾜] — the lax ㄱ tenses to ㄲ when an aspirate-initial syllable follows. Four major rules — tensing, nasalisation, liquid assimilation, and linking — operate between spelling and surface form. The rules are unrecorded in the orthography because Sejong's design preserved the morpheme: 학 always looks like 학 regardless of what surrounds it. The student learns to predict, in writing, the surface form a fluent speaker would produce from a given written word, and to recover the underlying spelling from a transcribed surface form. This matters for reading dialogue (where surface forms appear written between quotes), for transcribing speech into morpheme-preserving spelling, and for recognising the patterns when the student later listens with a real audio resource.
Outcome
The student can predict in writing the surface form a fluent Korean speaker would produce from any written word, recover the underlying spelling from a transcribed surface form, and explain why Sejong designed Korean orthography to preserve the morpheme.
Sub-units