From http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=hangul

Hangul is the Korean alphabet. It was devised by King Sejong sometime around 1446, when he realized that Chinese was simply too complex for the average joe to learn. Its brilliance is only apparent when you study Korean: it’s 100% phonetic (*) , the characters themselves are simple to write. Indeed, one of the initial criticisms of Hangul (1) was that it was too simple to learn - REAL men learned Chinese ideograms. For this reason, widespread use of Hangul did not come about until the 20th century, as a result of national pride.

Hangul is, as another noder put it, easy to learn, given the proper attitude. The first step is to execute that anal-retentive English teacher that lives in your forebrain as Korean is nothing like English. If you want to learn Korean, the first step is to throw out any English grammar you’ve learned.

The second step is to remember, you are learning an alphabet; by themselves, these are not individual words or any of that crazy Japanese stuff

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