Reading & Writing with Dal★Shabet

Up until this point in my K-pop fandom (nearly one and a half-years in), though I’ve picked up the meanings of the various and oft-repeated lines of dialog and phrases heard in songs and variety shows (Otokke, anyone?), when it came to understanding the Korean Hangul writing, it was simply beyond me.
   It wasn’t until Dal Shabet came along that I suddenly had an actual desire to read those strange characters written and wanted to make an actual effort to learn the characters- Seems that after watching Dal Shabet videos incessantly online, I found that I could easily recognize part of their name in Korean, which I identified as “a C followed by a kanji “to” and a number2”: 달. Feeling quite proud of myself for even recognizing THAT much, I began to want to know EXACTLY what each symbol meant, and so FINALLY after all this time, I went online and began to study the writing in earnest!
   Fortunately for a TOTAL Hangul newbie like myself, Korean culture is BIG TIME online, and I easily found a bunch of really great places which taught Hangul in easy-to-understand lessons! Using the instructions that taught the basic sounds attributed to each character, I learned enough that I began to experiment writing names on my own! I tried to write “Dal Shabet” using the lessons I’d learned and came up with this:

Well, that wasn’t quite right, as I was still learning the “breakdowns” of the language, (which words are identified as “uee” and which are ‘ooi”, etc) but after figuring some of it out (as well as the fact that the “s” sound is pronounced with a “t” if it’s at the end, I realized it was actually written like this:

But it was a start, and my next project was to try and spell all the Dal Shabet members names using the lessons I’d learned…to limited success- as you can see my original guesses written on the left had a few errors here and there (only Serri and Jiyul spelled without mistake)...After I checked my answers, I corrected the mistakes in red (on the right), but at least I understood what had been written wrong and WHY. I was learning! Not Bad!

  For my next lesson, I wanted to see if I could translate members names using only the written Hangul and my lessons. I decided to try and see if I could figure out all the APink members names, since, Eunji and Naeun aside, I didn't know any of the members. Finding a Hangul listing of the girls' names, I wrote out what I thought the Hangul spelled out (in blue) and when I was done, I checked the chart’s names listed and saw what I'd translated wasn't too far off what their names really were! Hey-those lessons work!

  Got a lot of studying and memorizing to do, but hopefully these lessons will “stick” and I’ll be able to better read things like Member and group names as well as the titles of the albums and songs I’m into! See what a whole lotta Dal Shabet Love can do for you? LOLOL! Nothing Drives Like Obsession!!!