I was just about to open Paint and color code a keyboard to show the vowel/consonant distribution, when it occurred to me to search the Internet first. because everything is out there somewhere! Ta-da! My Linguistics has done it already.
Note how this is different from English vowel distribution. English has only a,e,i,o,u for vowels. Korean has ㅛㅕㅑㅐㅒㅔㅖㅗㅓㅏㅣㅠㅜㅡ. You always start with a consonant, so your left hand, then add the vowel on your right hand, for a sort of balanced rhythm to Hangul typing. Further, you don’t need to capitalize like in English, but you do need to use the shift key to get a few of the letters ㅃㅉㄸㄲㅆ ㅒㅖ. These are thankfully logically located so the key you press for ㅂ gives you ㅃ when you shift. The diphthongs which are combinations of vowels you make by just typing the two vowels. For example, ㅗ plus ㅏgives 와. So the bottom line is that typing Korean isn’t as hard as it might appear. You have a limited number of characters which combine to make syllables, and you just type them on a regular keyboard.
On my to-do list is learning how to touch type in Korean. I can say that my words per minute has increased from 9 to 18 in two months. Whoa ho! No, I haven’t actually spent any time trying to practice typing, but I am starting to use the keyboard instead of the mouse clicking on a virtual keyboard. Last time I tried to download software to teach me to type in Korean on a keyboard, I was discouraged by the all-Korean instructions. So I pushed it off as something to master later when my vocabulary improved. However, I do think my slow typing in Korean is annoying. So annoyance might motivate me to learn to type on the keyboard. Haha. I laugh at myself every day.
As promised, this is the second part of my post Typing in Hangeul.
Today I will be presenting the Korean Keyboard Layout that I’ve worked so hard for. It took me hours making it so I hope no one would snatch it and claim that they made it themselves. Anyway, here it is:
I used the keyboard layout of my laptop so it may not be similar to other keyboards but the main idea is that each letter represents a character in 한글.
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Hanguk Babble 