Singer Lee Sun-hee explores Korean alphabet's history, 'possibilities' in educational song
"You and Me, All Together" premiered on YouTube on Sept. 8. The song is scheduled to be introduced in 2,777 schools — across 47 countries — that offer Korean as part of their regular curriculum.
Singer Lee Sun-hee poses with a lyric for “You and Me, All Together” (translated) at a cafe in southern Seoul on Oct. 8.KWEN HYEK-JAE
Veteran singer Lee Sun-hee lent her voice to “You and Me, All Together” (translated), a song designed to teach hangul, the Korean alphabet.
She composed the music herself, while television announcer Lee Geum-hee wrote the lyrics.
“I wanted to find a way to make the scientific principles behind hangul easy to understand,” the singer said during an interview at a cafe in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, on Thursday, a day before Hangul Day.
This year marks 100 years since the Korean Language Society, a scholarly organization devoted to studying and preserving hangul, established “Gagyanal,” or “Gagya Day,” in 1926 to commemorate the proclamation of the Korean alphabet.
The International Korean Education Foundation approached Lee Sun-hee with the project last year.
“You and Me, All Together” premiered on YouTube on Sept. 8. The song is scheduled to be introduced in 2,777 schools — across 47 countries — that offer Korean as part of their regular curriculum.
Announcer Lee Geum-hee, left, and singer Lee Sun-heeTHE INTERNATIONAL KOREAN EDUCATION FOUNDATION
The singer’s favorite line brings together two prominent Korean figures separated by centuries: King Sejong the Great (1397-1450), the creator of hangul, and BTS, the K-pop superstars whom Lee Sun-hee credits with helping Korean culture flourish today.
“I love the chorus, in which King Sejong and BTS appear together,” she said.
The line goes, “From King Sejong to BTS, people who love Korean live here."
The song teaches the logic behind hangul’s design by describing how heaven, humanity and earth come together to form vowels through phrases such as “Heaven to the right of a person makes ‘a’” and “Heaven beneath earth makes ‘u.’” In the original alphabet, a dot symbolized the round heavens, a vertical line represented a person and a horizontal line stood for the flat earth. The vowel “a” combined the dot with the vertical line, while “u” placed it beneath the horizontal line.
The song even features a rap, with four Korean words for “heat wave” fired off at breakneck speed: “mudeowi, bulbyeotdeowi, jjimtongdeowi, gamasotdeowi.” Each word is a detailed variation of the term, with a different prefix added to deowi, or “heat” in Korean.
“I wanted students abroad to enjoy learning hangul through the song as if they were learning through a game,” singer Lee said.
A still from the music video of “You and Me, All Together” (translated), a song for Korean language educationSCREEN CAPTURE
She saw the song’s impact firsthand when she visited schools in Malaysia in June and Uzbekistan in September.
“Even after just one or two listens [of the track], every student could sing the simpler parts of the chorus, and their pronunciation was remarkably accurate,” she said. “I was stunned. K-dramas and K-pop have clearly made the language familiar to students in both countries. They all knew how to say ‘hello’ and ‘nice to meet you’ in Korean.”
As a singer, Lee Sun-hee also appreciated what she described as hangul’s “possibilities.”
“The beauty of Korean words lies in their subtle and varied shades of meaning,” she said.
Her song “Destiny” (2005) uses many words with soft consonants, such as “n” and “m,” or words that end in vowels to convey a sense of pure, unwavering love. Hard-edged rock songs, by contrast, tend to favor words that end in consonants.
“Foreign fans of K-pop today seem to understand these strengths of hangul better than we might expect,” she said with a laugh.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
