Left, Right, Left - Korean keyboards and input
Monday, September 8th, 2008Korean text input.
Insanely logical. The Korean keyboard.
Have you ever sat down and thought about how simplistic the setup is? We’re talking about a keyboard that originally housed 26 English letters but now logistically houses 한굴. Not bad at all, really
Not to mention that if I were to type in English a bunch of random letters such as “awfeiojawcneliawefiawn” the English keyboard doesn’t discern between consonant and vowel - even though in English we actually do have rules about CV order. For example, a”normal” English word cannot have three vowels back-to-back (unless of course it has a French origin or other language whose rules are different). But in Korean, there are only nine possibilities for a syllable block. But keep cool - your Korean keyboard knows this already. “마여두푲닻ㅁ음ㅇㅏㅣㅁㅊ호허ㅏㅣ” See? I can type randomness and they will neatly find themselves a place - kind of like musical chairs. Also a little like a mild case of OCD…
Cellphones are a different matter altogether though.
In order to type in Korean, one must input consonants like usual but “draw” out the vowels. Follow me. The brush strokes for the ㅐ vowel involves three lines. First a vertical, then a dot (or small dash), then a vertical.ㅣ - ㅣmakesㅐ.
So to type a simple word like 한국어, one would enter “8″ twice (first to get a ㅅ then to get aㅎ) then “1″ (to get a vertical line) then “2″ (to get a horizontal line) then “5″ (to get the ㄴ) then “4″ (for the ㄱ) then “3″ and “2″ (to get the ㅜ one must first get a ㅡ) and “3″ again and finally “0″ and “2″ and “1″. Careful not to press “1″ then “2″ in which case you’ll get aㅏ instead of aㅓ.
Confused? It catches on pretty quick. It’s pretty ingenious considering the phone can also seamlessly type in English. What I don’t know is if Korean cellphones have a form of T9 (predictable text). Anyone want to clarify this?
All things considered, I consider Korean a very logical written language. It is quite neat and organized in my honest opinion. Growing up in an English-language majority environment, Roman letter-based languages (Spanish, Italian, French, etc) don’t “scare” me. They just looked different. But with Korean, a whole new “alphabet” is used and from my perspective it looked just as daunting as other East Asian writing systems such as Chinese and Japanese. But now that I have become accustomed to Korean, I feel like I lucked out. Anyone else feeling this? Japanese and Chinese still scare me 
Thoughts?
Posted by Matthew in How Koreans Do It |
September 10th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Now you make me wanna buy a Korean-text cell phone - any way to get them here in the US?
But I agree - hangeul is very “user-friendly”.
September 10th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I iPhone now supports typing in Korean. But since I don’t own one, I don’t know what would happen if you sent a 한글 text to a non-iPhone in the us… someone wanna try it and report back?
September 10th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Great post Matthew
I love texting in Korean
As for texting in the USA, there’s Helio. My cousin has it and uses it to text message from USA to Korea. It’s run by SK Telecom.
http://ka.helio.com/#homepage
September 10th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Awesome post, Matthew!
I know what you mean about the Korean writing system…a little bit before reading this post, I decided to make a (very) weak attempt at learning about Japanese writing, maybe learn some Hiragana or whatnot…after about an hour of not getting ANYWHERE, I gave up. I TOTALLY lucked out with Korean! Thanks for the 한글, King Sejong!
September 10th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
You think Chinese and Japanese writing scares y’all? At least CJK scripts have different shapes within each system.
Devanagari is truly scary for the uninitiated - it’s written with that prominent horizontal line that looks like a musical staff
Tried to learn that script - gave up after a few afternoons.
September 10th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I’ve known the placement for 한글 on the keyboard for a few years now but can you believe I never actively REALISED that /y/ sounds of the vowels are located directly above them, until I read your post?
I also never knew that the cellphone text input was so different! That’s actually a pretty clever way to do it.
September 10th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
That 한글 is an alphabet is why I chose to learn Korean, but I still say Italian beats 한글 in how easy it is to read.
I didn’t realise that the /y/ sounds are located above, either. I must say that the layout is very user friendly on computers. Although, the special keys are a nightmare to figure out, since I never use English keyboards.
I’m so used to the qwerty keyboard that I quite like it. The qwerty layout dates back to when they used writing machines and the point of the qwerty layout was to place the most used letters far from each other to stop the machine getting jammed. And I guess it worked! Kind of pointless now, but I like the oddball… XD
September 11th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
I can remember the top and middle rows quite well, but I always have difficulty with the bottom left side. Anyone has any tips/insights? Or pure memory work?
September 12th, 2008 at 3:50 am
My Korean cellphone used the layout Matthew posted… But I once met a Korean guy, and I wanted to show him my awesome skill with Korean-cellphone texting. I didn’t have my phone, so I took his phone, ready to impress… and went “Bleah?!” He had an LG phone, which uses a different text-keypad layout! He wasn’t impressed, and I couldn’t explain to him that with my phone, really, I’m a pro…
Either way, the LG pattern is also fairly intuitive, once you figure it out…
September 12th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
I didn’t know the iPhone supports 한글. Good to know!
And I certainly didn’t know that different companies utilize different typing schemes (lol Daniel)
I am most impressed by the Helios - I did not know that it had an international texting feature. I wonder how expensive each text message is? Same standard rate?
Chriss brings up a good point that I neglected to mention in the blog. Inventor C. L. Sholes indeed made the strange letter arrangement to prevent his typewriter from jamming up by spreading out common letter clusters. Although it appears like he was just a jerk, he was just thinking of making a product that would need less maintenance - as his first typewriter had the letters arranged alphabetically on two rows, his QWERTY arrangement was quite innovative for his time.
September 26th, 2008 at 5:49 am
I use to write down my vocab on a qwertz keyboard. I sometimes mistype some similar characters and when learning my printout, I wonder what that new word might be. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen often that I don’t notice the mistake. However, typing a lot helps learn the korean keyboard, especially when you cannot cheat by taking a glance on it…
One specificity of the qwertz keyboard, is that y and z are exchanged by comparison to the qwerty one. So the ㅛ is located way back in the consonant domain while the ㅋ sits right to the ㅅ, which is weird since the other “h”-consonnants ㅌ ㅊ and ㅍ are usually located on the lower row.
September 26th, 2008 at 5:54 am
By the way, Shan, since you have problems with the bottom left side, just think it’s all “h” consonnants. I memorized their location like this:
c= c+h => ㅊ like cheese!
v=in German you pronounce it like F, and ㅍ is used as a replacement for the F in Konglish, what a nice coincidence!
For the remainings, I had no problem since (see my above post), the Z and Y are exchanged so x hosts the ㅌ while the Z hosts the ㅋ. Hope that helps a bit.