Ready, Set, Type! Practice Typing Korean with Games
So you know how to type in Korean. Now what? How do you get good at it?
One of my students in my Beginner Korean class just picked up some stickers for her keyboard to practice typing Korean on her computer, and asked me how do you get used to the placement of all the 한글 characters? They seem to be in places that make no sense.
The answer is: Practice, PRACTICE, PRACTICE!
Well, just like when we all learned to type our native languages, it just takes familiarity and practice of making your fingers learn where the characters are, but that can be really difficult when we don’t use a second language very often.
So here’s some FREE tools and websites that can help you practice touch typing and memorizing the Korean keyboard layout.
Here are some tools to help you with that:
TaDak TaDak
A Korean website to help kids practice typing, TaDak TaDak is an onomatopoeia for the sound keys make when you type (타닥타닥). This site rocks! It has so many different exercises for practicing typing Korean and it’s freeeeeee.
Individual 한글 Placement - Helps you to memorize the layout of the keyboard
Word Practice - like flashcards! You see a picture and the matching word in Korean and type it.
Under 낱말연습 tab, you can practice with 우리낱말 for user-submitted flashcards. Accuracy not ensured though because a lot of these are submitted by kids lol
Sentence Practice - You can practice your 띄어쓰기 here and get a feedback on your typing speed (타자속도) and accuracy (정확도)
Hard Mode TaDak Games
If you want to really suffer or you’re an advanced learned, try these TaDak games on for size.
Dictation: You listen to the recording, type what the speaker says and get scored on your results. I have never gotten 100% ㅠㅠ
Puzzle: Guess the 2-3 character words from the 한글 provided. You’ll get a lot of practice furiously typing and wracking your brain for vocabulary that fit the possible combinations.
I’m sure we all felt like (or still feel like, in my case) children when it comes to learning Korean; my advice is to just lean into it. Don’t be taken aback by using tools for kids.
Yes, I am a child. Please teach me and don’t be mad at me because I don’t know anything and I’m trying my best.
Hangul Attack
GO! Billy Korean provides amazing resources for Korean learning, and one of those is Hangul Attack, a completely free game to practice Korean typing.
You type the 한글 as they fall from the sky; if you make a mistake, a meteor will fall down. You can shoot meteors down with your space bar. Any characters or meteors that hit the ground drain your life points.
Visit Billy’s website to download and install the game for your computer.
TypeRacer
Increase your typing speed while racing against others - publicly or privately.
You can either enter a typing race against random online opponents, practice on your own or race your friends. Great tool for those of us with a competitive streak cough cough
Try it out here!
Typing Tests
I’m sure we’ve all taken one or two typing tests for our native languages at some point or another, so it shouldn’t surprise you that there are options for Korean typing tests. Here’s just a few that give you text to type and measure your speed and accuracy.
Typing.Works (make sure to set it to “Native”)
10FastFingers
If anyone else has great resources they’d like to add, please reblog!
Hope this helps you out! ^^