WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Hangul
Korean is the only language here written in the Hangul script. The longest word you will practise here is 빠르다, and 62 distinct characters appear in all. Korean is typed on the 2-Set Hangul layout.
Designed from scratch in the fifteenth century, and it shows: letters are shaped to reflect how they are pronounced, and they assemble into square syllable blocks as you type. That suits a keyboard unusually well. The standard Dubeolsik layout puts consonants on the left hand and vowels on the right, which produces natural hand alternation because Korean syllables alternate consonant and vowel.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Distinct characters
- 62 distinct characters across 42 practice words
- Composition
- keystrokes combine into syllable blocks as you type
- Input
- typed through an input method that composes as you go
- Hangul keyboard layout
- 2-Set Hangul
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 62 of the 62 characters its practice words use
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in the language below, most frequent first. They are what you will be composing most often rather than what sits on a key.
- 다5
- 시4
- 나3
- 것2
- 늘2
- 움2
- 좋2
- 천2
- 간1
- 공1
The longest practice word in this script is 빠르다 in Korean.
The one language written in Hangul
Other writing systems
- Hebrew Written right to left, with no vowels in ordinary text — readers supply them from context, and the dots that mark them are used only in dictionaries, poetry and scripture.
- Kannada Telugu's sibling, slightly more angular and sharing an ancestor with it.
- Khmer Holder of the record for the largest alphabet — around 74 characters between the consonants, dependent and independent vowels and diacritics.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.