A syntactic method is applied to the recognition of Korean characters (Hangul). Since they develop into complex characters by the sequential addition of fundamental characters under positioning rules, there are a large amount of characters and consequently there exist many similar characters. Therefore, the sequential extraction, according to the positioning rules, of fundamental characters composing Korean characters is effective for automatic recognition. As a structural analysis, a production process of fundamental characters is represented by tree grammars, and the extraction algorithm of fundamental characters and the results of computer simulation are described.