This is the standard English keyboard, also known as the QWERTY keyboard. They are everywhere, like on your phones and computers, and we use them on a daily basis for texting people or searching something on the Internet. Languages that use Latin characters like English have similar layouts, some with minor changes like the QWERTZ keyboard used by Central Europe or AZERTY keyboard used by France and Belgium. But what would a keyboard look like for languages that don’t use Latin characters, like Korean? Well, if you replaced all the English letters with Korean ones, you’ll get the Korean keyboard. You might be surprised at how well the Korean alphabet adapts to the QWERTY layout, but there’s a simple reason for that. English consists of 26 letters, with 21 consonants and 5 vowels (not including “y”). Korean, on the other hand, has two letters less: 24, with 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Unlike English, which scatters vowels all over the keyboard, Korean neatly divides the keyboard into two halves via an imaginary line, placing consonants on the left side and vowels on the right. Let’s look at the left side first, the 14 consonants. There are 기역, 니은, 디귿, 리을, 미음, 비읍, 시옷, 이응, 지읒, 치읓, 키읔, 티읕, 피읖, and 히읗. This video will focus more on the writing aspect of Korean, so if you’re interested in learning how to read it—like each letter’s name and pronunciation—I strongly recommend you go watch this video. After all, it’s easier to write Korean if you have a good understanding of the Korean alphabet. Just like English, Korean has a correct order of writing letters, as shown on these diagrams. The numbers indicate the strokes’ order, and each arrow indicates the stroke’s direction. And unless the number changes, you shouldn’t lift your pencil for a stroke. Let’s start with 기역, which is written in 1 stroke. It’s as easy as drawing a 90-degree angle. The angle is 90 degrees when 기역 is at the bottom of a character; if it’s at the top, it will usually have a sharper, acute angle. We’ll come back to top and bottom consonants later, but for now, it’s good to note that there are two slightly different ways of writing 기역. Korean fonts also do the same thing. The next is 니은 with also 1 stroke, and it’s a flipped version of 기역. This letter, however, does not have differing angles like 기역 does. The next is 디귿 with 2 strokes. Essentially what you do is write a horizontal bar and then connect it with 니은. The next is 리을 with 3 strokes. You can think of this as a combination of 기역 and 디귿. Just make sure that they’re small so when combined, you get a normal-sized 리을. The next is 미음 with 3 strokes, and as you can see, it’s a square or rectangle. This is actually how I always draw my squares; I don’t know if it’s because I’m Korean. The next is 비읍 with 4 strokes, the highest number among the 14 consonants. Simply put, write an “11” and then an “=” sign in between so that the bottom bar connects smoothly with the two vertical bars. The next is 시옷 with 2 strokes. Many people put the second stroke starting from the middle of the first one so that there’s a little nub at the top, but you could also write it with both strokes perfectly connected at the top so that it looks like an upside-down V. If you’re wondering why there are multiple ways of writing the same letter, think of how English does the same with “a” or “g,” for instance. The next is 이응 with 1 stroke, and it’s written the same way as “O” or a circle. The direction should be counterclockwise, but it could be different for left-handed people. The next is 지읒 with 2 or 3 strokes, depending on how you write it. The longer way is putting a flat bar on top and 시옷 underneath. The faster and more popular way is combining those first two strokes into one. The result resembles a Japanese character, which is how most people, including me, write it. The next is 치읓 with 3 or 4 strokes. It’s지읒 with an extra stroke on top. That stroke can be vertical, horizontal, diagonal—it doesn’t really matter. When writing fast, my strokes always look a bit diagonal, but it depends on people’s writing styles. After that, you add a 지읒 underneath. The next is 키읔 with 2 strokes. You first write 기역 then add an extra stroke in the middle. Similar to how 기역has a different angle at certain times, 키읔 also does the same. The next is 티읕 with 3 strokes. It’s written the same way as a capital “E,” or an “=” sign with 니은 attached to it on the left. The next is 피읖 with 4 strokes, tied with 비읍 for the most strokes among the 14 consonants. In simple terms, put a flat bar on top, write an “11” underneath, and finish it with a flat bar on the bottom. And the final consonant is 히읗 with 3 strokes. It’s really 이응 wearing a hat. Start off with the same small stroke that 치읓 has, add a flat bar below, and then write 이응 underneath. The 이응 may or may not touch the flat bar; again, it depends on your writing style. Great, we covered how to write all the consonants in Korean. Now let’s move on to the other side of the keyboard: the 10 vowels ㅏㅑㅓㅕㅗㅛㅜㅠㅡㅣ. You might have noticed that the keyboard has two extra vowels in the upper right side, bringing the total count to 12 instead of 10. An easy explanation is that since Korean has two less letters in its alphabet compared to English, it had to fill up those extra spots somehow. If you’re wondering why those vowels look more complex than the others, they’re called “double vowels,” which we’ll talk about soon. We can classify vowels into two main categories: horizontal vowels and vertical vowels. Horizontal vowels are those with long horizontal bars. By the same token, vertical vowels have long vertical bars. Many of these vowels have short strokes attached to them. Horizontal vowels have them above or below the bar. Vertical vowels have them on the left or right side of the bar. Korean writing generally follows a left-to-right, top-to-bottom approach. Therefore, you would write the strokes first if they are above or on the left of the bar. For instance, ㅓ, ㅕ, ㅗ, and ㅛ have strokes written first, and then the long bar. On the other hand, you would write ㅏ, ㅑ, ㅜ, and ㅠ starting with the bar and add the short strokes afterwards. The last two vowels ㅡ and ㅣ are straightforward because it’s only the bar. As you can tell, writing vowels is much easier than writing consonants. There we go: now you know how to write the entire Korean alphabet. But that isn’t enough to write Korean. Unlike English, which is written linearly and always adds letters to the right, Korean first combines letters to form more complex characters. Each character has a box-like shape and four components: top consonants, bottom consonants, horizontal vowels, and vertical vowels. The rules when it comes to writing Korean characters are: 1. You need at least one top consonant. I say “at least one,” because spoiler alert, double consonants exist. But it’s not possible for a character to have no top consonant. 2. You need at least one vowel, whether it’s a horizontal vowel or a vertical vowel, or even both, but it’s not possible to have no vowel. And finally, 3. You can have up to 2 bottom consonants. This also means you can have one or none on the bottom. Similar to how there is a correct order of writing strokes for each letter, there’s also a correct order of writing letters for each character, which is top consonants first, then horizontal vowels, then vertical vowels, then finally bottom consonants. Let’s talk about top consonants, which there are 19 of. You might be wondering how that’s possible when there are only 14 consonants, but it’s because Korean has something called “double consonants,” which combines two consonants. There are 5 top double consonants: 쌍기역, 쌍디귿, 쌍비읍, 쌍시옷, and 쌍지읒. “쌍” means “pair,” which makes sense here because there are two of the same consonants put together. Writing these are obviously incredibly easy: just write the same thing twice. Let’s look at bottom consonants. There are a lot more bottom consonants than top consonants: 28, to be exact. This includes the 14 normal consonants, 13 double consonants, and “nothing.” “Nothing” is when there is no bottom consonant because Korean characters don’t always need to have one. The bottom double consonants look slightly different than the top ones. Listing them in alphabetical order, they are: ㄲ (쌍기역), which we saw earlier as a top consonant; it works both ways. ㄳ (기역시옷), ㄵ (니은지읒), ㄶ (니은히읗), ㄺ (리을기역), ㄻ (리을미음), ㄼ (리을비읍), ㄽ (리을시옷), ㄾ (리을티읕), ㄿ (리을피읖), ㅀ (리을히읗), ㅄ (비읍시옷), and ㅆ (쌍시옷), which, again, we saw earlier as a top consonant; it works both ways as well. As a result, 쌍기역 and 쌍시옷 are the only double consonants that can go on both top and bottom. Writing these are incredibly straightforward since they are two consonants put together, so I don’t think I need to explain any further. Now let’s talk about vowels. We already covered the 10 vowels earlier, but just like how there are double consonants, there are also double vowels. There are 11 of them. In order, they are: ㅐ (애), which is ㅏ and ㅣ combined. ㅒ (얘), which is ㅑ and ㅣ combined. ㅔ (에), which is ㅓ and ㅣ combined. ㅖ (예), which is ㅕ and ㅣ combined. ㅘ (와), which is ㅗ and ㅏ combined. ㅙ (왜), which is ㅗ and ㅐ combined. I guess this could even be called a triple vowel since ㅐ is a double vowel itself, but let’s not go there. ㅚ (외), which is ㅗ and ㅣ combined. ㅝ (워), which is ㅜ and ㅓ combined. ㅞ (웨), which is ㅜ and ㅔ combined. Again, technically is a triple vowel, but let’s not call it that for simplicity sakes. ㅟ (위), which is ㅜ and ㅣ combined. And finally, ㅢ (의), which is ㅡ and ㅣ combined. Writing these double vowels are very simple and straightforward like writing double consonants. Just take a left-to-right approach. For example, ㅐ is ㅏ and ㅣ combined, so just write ㅏ first, and then connect it with ㅣ. Another example is ㅞ: since it’s ㅜ and ㅔ combined, just write ㅜ and put ㅔ next to it. Now let’s look at a few examples. Keep in mind the order of writing: top consonants first, then horizontal vowels, vertical vowels, and finally bottom consonants. This is 가, one of the simplest characters with only one top consonant and one vowel. How would you write this? It’s easy: just write 기역 and then add ㅏ next to it. What about 불? You start with 비읍, add ㅜ underneath, and finish it with 리을 at the very bottom. Let’s try something challenging then. This is 뷁, which looks intimidating at first glance, but remember the writing order. You would write the top consonant 비읍 first, then the horizontal vowel ㅜ, then the vertical vowel ㅔ, and finally the two bottom consonants 리을 and 기역. This is one of the more complex characters that you could write in Korean, and fun fact, it’s not used in everyday life. Korean has a ton of characters that are useless and meaningless, which we’ll revisit near the end of the video. I’m showing you this to demonstrate what Korean characters could look like when pushed to their limits. Now that you know how to write Korean in handwriting, it’s time to talk about how to type Korean on a keyboard. Typing is much easier than writing because you don’t have to worry about how each letter is written. All you have to know is the order of writing characters—top consonant, horizontal vowel, vertical vowel, and bottom consonant—because that’s the same order of typing Korean as well. The difficulty of typing Korean for most learners would most likely be memorizing where each key is, so to make visualization easier, let’s combine the Korean and QWERTY keyboards together. This is actually what Korean keyboards look like on laptops. If you want to follow along while watching this video, you could go to Google Translate, select Korean as your language, and press the keyboard icon. Each English letter has a Korean counterpart on the keyboard, so memorizing key placement might be easier. For example, the “Q” key is home to 비읍, the “W” key is home to 지읒, and so on. Hopefully with enough practice, you’ll memorize where each Korean letter is. Since both Korean and English have identical keyboard layouts, Koreans will sometimes type things in English that make no sense at all. A notable example is Instagram usernames of many Korean celebrities. However, if you were to type those English letters on a Korean keyboard, you’ll quickly realize that it spells their Korean names. Let’s take IU’s username for example. “D” is 이응. “L” is ㅣ. “W” is 지읒. “L” is ㅣ. “R” is 기역. “M” is ㅡ. And “A” is 미음. This ends up spelling “이지금,” which is actually a play-on-words of her real name 이지은. On the Korean keyboard, you’ll see that some keys have two letters instead of one. To access the upper letters, you have to press SHIFT, just like typing capital letters. On the top left corner, these extra letters are top double consonants. So for example, pressing SHIFT and 비읍 automatically gives you 쌍비읍. CAPS LOCK doesn’t work in Korean, so you always have to press SHIFT. Moreover, on the top right corner, there are double vowels that you also need to press the SHIFT key for. Pressing SHIFT and ㅐ gives you ㅒ, and pressing SHIFT and ㅔ gives you ㅖ. It’s convenient since they look very similar and only have a one-stroke difference. By the way, I promised earlier that I’d explain why ㅐ and ㅔ have their own keys unlike other double vowels. It’s because they are the two most commonly used double vowels in Korean, so it makes sense for them to have their own keys. Double vowels other than these four are typed in the same way you would write them: for example, to type ㅘ, you have to type ㅗ and ㅏ separately. These double vowels don’t get their own shortcut keys. Let’s see some typing examples. To type 귤, you have to press 기역, ㅠ, and 리을. One thing you might find interesting is that despite the English letter “B” and the Korean letter “ㅠ” sharing the same key, many Koreans including me type “B” with their left hands but type “ㅠ” with their right. It might seem odd that Koreans use different hands for the same key depending on the language, but it feels psychologically correct. Since ㅠ is a vowel and all vowels are on the right side, typing it with the right hand simply seems more natural. To type 옛, you have to press 이응, SHIFT ㅔ for ㅖ, and 시옷. And to type the strange character 뷁, you have to press 비읍, ㅜ, ㅔ, 리을, and 기역. Typing in Korean is scientifically easy. As I’ve mentioned in the beginning of the video, the Korean keyboard separates consonants and vowels into two halves. This results in the left and right hand alternating when typing, a sharp contrast to the left-hand-oriented QWERTY keyboard. For instance, the three most common letters in the English alphabet—"E,” “T,” and “A”—are all on the left side. Moreover, while over 3,000 English words can be typed with only the left hand, only 300 words can be typed with only the right hand, highlighting that the QWERTY layout is easier for left-handed people. To visualize how each hand is used for typing, we can use something called a “heat map.” The darker colors indicate more frequently used letters, while lighter colors indicate less frequently used letters. For instance, the most common letter in English is “E,” so it has the darkest shade. Overall, the left side is significantly darker, and therefore busier, than the right. The QWERTY layout has a left-to-right hand ratio of 59:41, meaning that the left hand does nearly 60% of typing. On the other hand, the Korean keyboard has a more balanced look. The most common consonants are on the left hand while the most common vowels are on the right. This, along with the fact that frequently used keys are on the keyboard’s resting position, underscores the efficiency in Korean typing compared to English. Therefore, it may come as a surprise that the left-to-right hand ratio is only marginally better than English: 58:42. There are reasons for the heavier left hand use. First of all, many Korean characters have more consonants than vowels, meaning the left hand inevitably works harder than the right. Furthermore, the right hand has a disadvantage where four of its keys are punctuation marks that are used much less. Still, despite the similar left hand use between Korean and English, the former has numerous advantages that the latter doesn’t have. Simply put, alternating hands when typing Korean is more rhythmic, accurate, faster, and less tiring. If you’re wondering how Korean is more efficient than English despite the similar left-to-right hand ratio, it’s because English has a ton of long words like “abracadabra,” “reverberate,” and “stewardesses” that overwork the left hand over 10 keys in a row. Meanwhile in Korean, the most keys you’ll ever type in a row with your left hand is only 3, reducing long-term stress and fatigue. There is a more efficient alternative to QWERTY called the Dvorak layout. Its logic is similar to how the Korean keyboard works: the vowels are on one hand and the most common consonants are in the other, resulting in alternating hands and a much better typing experience overall. Moreover, the left-to-right hand ratio is 43:57, making it better for right-handed people. However, practically nobody uses the Dvorak layout, so Korean typing remains more efficient than English. In fact, Korean as a language is quite efficient overall. Among the most popular languages in the world, Korean has the second smallest alphabet after Hebrew, yet has the most words in the dictionary: over 1.1 million. The fact that over a million words can be constructed using only 24 letters is beyond astonishing. This might be due to the fact that there are many Korean characters to begin with; after all, words are a series of characters put together. So how many Korean characters are there? It’s actually quite a simple question to tackle. To recap, there are 19 top consonants, 21 vowels, and 28 bottom consonants. This becomes a multiplication problem: 19 times 21 times 28 is 11,172. This is the total number of characters that exist in Korean—no more, no less. Every single Korean word comes from these 11,000 characters. So really, you could organize all Korean characters into a rectangular prism that is 19 layers thick, with each sheet being a 21 by 28 grid. This is a good way to visualize Korean: each row has the same vowel; each column has the same bottom consonant; and each layer has the same top consonant. Like English, Korean also has the concept of “alphabetical order.” Take a look at this: these are all the top consonants, vowels, and bottom consonants arranged in alphabetical order. If you put together the first top consonant 기역, the first vowel ㅏ, and the first bottom consonant “nothing,” you’ll get the very first character in the Korean language: 가. You can think of it like the letter “A,” which is why the Korean equivalent of “ABC” is “가나다.” Using the same method, you can get the last character of the Korean language. The last top consonant is 히읗, the last vowel is ㅣ, and the last bottom consonant is also 히읗. Put these together and you’ll get 힣, which could be the Korean equivalent of the letter “Z.” As a result, while you could use “A~Z” to represent all letters in English, you could similarly use “가~힣” to represent all characters in Korean. You might find it interesting, though, that 힣 is an unused, uncommon character like 뷁. In other words, it’s not used in any conventional Korean word. Characters like this exist simply because we can make them, not because they’re actually used anywhere. This is only the tip of the iceberg for unused characters. To put it into perspective, out of over 11,000 characters, only around 2,350 of them are used in everyday Korean words, meaning that nearly 80% of characters remain useless. What you see right now is all 11,172 characters. The colored ones are the only ones you’ll find in a book or dictionary. The blank ones are complete gibberish and meaningless even to Koreans. If you rummage through the entire list, you can find extremely weird characters. Take a look at these, which have 20 strokes each, the most of any character. It looks intimidating at first even to Koreans, but it’s a saint compared to insane Chinese characters that look like QR codes. Realistically speaking, however, the most strokes you’ll ever have to write for everyday purposes is 15 for this character: “뺐.” For context, “뺐다” means “pulled out.” It’s very unlikely you’ll encounter anything with more strokes than this in real life. Then, is 20 strokes the craziest Korean can get? Well, actually… no, not if we go back in time a bit. You see, we’ve only been talking about modern Korean so far. But hundreds of years ago, there used to be Old Korean, just like how there used to be Old English. And it will completely shatter your mind. The best example is this monstrosity. At 29 strokes, it’s the character with the most strokes that Korean ever had. To top it off, it ignores almost every single rule of modern Korean, boasting three top consonants, three bottom consonants, and an illegal double vowel. I don’t even know how to pronounce this. Is this what Korean looks like to foreigners? Some Old Korean characters can get quite funny. Stacked consonants! Stacked vowels! Triangles! Which I guess makes sense because we already have circles and squares, but it really reminds me of Squid Game. I guess the point is that you should be relieved that Korean has gotten simpler over the years and less complicated to learn. Old Korean had 125 top consonants, 95 vowels, and 138 bottom consonants, producing over 1.6 million characters alone. That’s half a million more than the number of Korean words there currently are. It is simply staggering. The most notable examples of Old Korean today are the Korean version of Microsoft Word called 한글 and this chestnut snack brand. Both of them have this little dot in the middle of the consonants, which eventually became the vowel ㅏ that we see today. There we go, now you know how to write Korean. Hopefully it was pretty simple and straightforward, and I hope you find it easy after some practice. Leave a like if this video was helpful on your Korean-learning journey, and don’t forget to watch “How to Read Korean,” which goes into detail about the Korean alphabet. More Korean videos are in the description below and subscribe to the channel if you want to see more. Since I did so much research about Korean letters and keyboards for this video, maybe I’ll make a video on Korean fonts, like how they’re less efficient than English and how they changed Pepsi forever. Thank you for watching. See you later.