0.6 Reading, Writing, and Typing Hangul — Epoché
What you will be able to do Assemble a syllable block from its letters and write it by hand in the conventional order of strokes. Type any Korean word on the two-set keyboard, and say which key carries which letter. Put a list of Korean words into dictionary order, and look a word up without help. Say what the software is doing while you type, and why a half-finished block on the screen is not a mistake. Prerequisites : 0.5, which gives you the bottom letters and the seven sounds they collapse into. You also need the ten vowels of 0.2 Hangul and the fourteen basic consonants of 0.3 Hangul , because this lesson puts every letter into a fixed order and then asks you to find any one of them on a keyboard. The five lessons before this one were about recognising letters and blocks. This one is about producing them, and it closes the volume, because a writing system you can only read is half a writing system. Three skills are involved: writing a block by hand, typing Korean, and finding a word in a dictionary. The third matters more than it sounds. Every time you meet an unknown word for the rest of this course you will want to look it up, and you cannot look anything up in an alphabet whose order you do not know. The letters You have met all of the letters by now, in four instalments. Here they are in the order they are always listed in, which is also the order they are sorted in: dull to learn, quick, and permanently useful. There are three lists, because a block has up to three positions and each position has its own inventory. The first is the nineteen onsets, the letters that can begin a block: the fourteen basic consonants, in the order you learned them, with the five doubled letters inserted directly after the plain letter each one is built from. Position in the block How many The letters, in order Onset, at the top left or the left 19 ㄱ ㄲ ㄴ ㄷ ㄸ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅃ ㅅ ㅆ ㅇ ㅈ ㅉ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎ Vowel, to the right or underneath 21 ㅏ ㅐ ㅑ ㅒ ㅓ ㅔ ㅕ ㅖ ㅗ ㅘ ㅙ ㅚ ㅛ ㅜ ㅝ ㅞ ㅟ ㅠ ㅡ ㅢ ㅣ Bottom letter, underneath everything 27, or none at all ㄱ ㄲ ㄳ ㄴ ㄵ ㄶ ㄷ ㄹ ㄺ ㄻ ㄼ ㄽ ㄾ ㄿ ㅀ ㅁ ㅂ ㅄ ㅅ ㅆ ㅇ ㅈ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎ The three rows are related but not identical. The vowel list has twenty-one members, not ten, because the combined vowels of lesson 0.4 are filed between the simple ones they are built from. The bottom list contains the eleven two-letter clusters, and one member that is not a letter at all: the absence of a bottom letter. A block with nothing underneath sorts ahead of every block that has something underneath. The doubled letters are why people think the order is unpredictable. It is not. Each doubled letter sits immediately after its plain partner, so ㄲ comes between ㄱ and ㄴ , and ㅆ between ㅅ and ㅇ . This is also the order a computer gives you, because the numbers assigned to Korean blocks in the international character standard were laid out to match it. Note that the onsets and the bottom letters are two uses of one set of consonant letters, not two sets: where a letter stands in the block decides what it does. Writing a block by hand Two rules cover almost everything. The first: move from top to bottom and from left to right. A horizontal stroke is drawn left to right, a vertical stroke top to bottom, and where a letter has both, the one that starts higher or further left goes first. The second: the letters inside a block are written in reading order, which you already know, onset then vowel then bottom letter. Apply that to 한 . You write ㅎ first, top left, and inside it the short horizontal stroke, the second horizontal stroke, then the circle. Then ㅏ at the right: the long vertical line, then the short stroke off it. Then ㄴ underneath, in one movement. Three letters, six strokes, and the order never changes. Letter Strokes The order to draw them in ㄱ one across, then down, without lifting the pen ㄴ one down, then across, without lifting the pen ㅁ three the left side down, then the top and right side, then the bottom ㅅ two the left leg from the apex down, then the right leg ㅏ two the long vertical line, then the short stroke to its right ㅗ two the short stroke upward first, then the long horizontal line Stroke order is not tidiness for its own sake. It buys speed, and legibility, since a letter drawn in the wrong order comes out with its proportions wrong; it also lets you read other people's handwriting, where shapes are abbreviated in ways that only make sense if you know which stroke came first. One more thing about proportion: every block fills a square of the same size, so the letters inside it shrink to fit, and a block of three letters has smaller letters than a block of two. Print does this for you. By hand you must do it deliberately, and pencilled squares fix the habit in a day. Typing on the two-set keyboard Korean is typed by letter, not by block. You press the keys for the letters in reading order, exactly as you write them, and the software assembles them into blocks as you go. The standard layout is the two-set keyboard, 두벌식 , so called because the keys fall into two sets: consonants on the left hand, vowels on the right. The name is what you look for in the keyboard settings of a phone or a computer. Row, left hand Consonants Row, right hand and its vowels Q W E R T ㅂ ㅈ ㄷ ㄱ ㅅ Y U I O P gives ㅛ ㅕ ㅑ ㅐ ㅔ A S D F G ㅁ ㄴ ㅇ ㄹ ㅎ H J K L gives ㅗ ㅓ ㅏ ㅣ Z X C V ㅋ ㅌ ㅊ ㅍ B N M gives ㅠ ㅜ ㅡ The five doubled consonants are typed with shift on the plain letter, the same relation they have in the alphabet: shift on ㄱ gives ㄲ , shift on ㅅ gives ㅆ , and so on for ㅃ , ㄸ and ㅉ . Two vowels take shift as well: O gives ㅒ and P gives ㅖ . Every other combined vowel is typed as its parts, so ㅘ is the ㅗ key and then the ㅏ key. Word Keys, in order What appears as you go 한국어 (the Korean language) g k s r n r d j the first block closes on the third key; the fourth key cannot join it, so a new block opens 사전 (a dictionary) t k w j s the third key first lands underneath the first block, and the fourth key pulls it back out 컴퓨터 (a computer) z j