Spelling Bee

After living across Asia, I thought I'd seen every kind of writing system. So when Adbebe claimed that Korean Hangul has a “logical, unambiguous system” where “every sound matches a single character,” I stopped cold. Because after 12 years of struggling to learn Korean, that hasn't been my reality at all. 

 

Hangul is not perfectly phonemic. Many challenges arise, some of which I experienced when learning this language growing up. One challenge being its underlying morphological root, which contains characters that are silent, much like silent letters the English language contains in words. 

 

Take the word 밝다 (bak - da, bright). It contains the character ㄹ (L sound) that is completely silent. A purely phonetic spelling would be 박다. But, the correct spelling which preserve the words root would be 밝다. That silent consonant behaves much like English's “b” in “debt,” or “gh” in “ghost” — irregularities Abebe says makes the “English spelling bee exciting.” 

 

At first, I always assumed my difficulty with Korean was due to my negligence — a third culture kid failing to learn their heritage language. But Abebe’s claim revealed to me that even a “logical” system has irregularities which makes spelling difficult. That the language itself is playing by its own complex rules, creating struggles for those learning it. 

 

Abebe is right that English is uniquely messy. But no, Hangul isn’t perfectly logical — at least not to the tongue that grew up stumbling over it. 

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Work Cited

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          Abebe, Nitsuh. “Not Every Language Has Spelling Bees. Here’s Why English Is Perfect for Them..” The New York Times, 28 May 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/magazine/spelling-bee-scripps-english-language.html. Accessed 23 Sept. 2026.

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