Although writing in Korean continues to be one of my top concerns, I have learned to write basic Korean as a young child. I learned how to write the language by hand while learning the alphabet and basic vocabulary before I started primary school. I had a chart of the Korean alphabet, starting with “가, 나, 다, 라, 마, 바, 사…” that I would sing and practice writing. If I remember correctly, I learned Korean writing around the same time as English. However, with the beginning of my school career at a British preschool, English became the main language of my academic experience. This background has helped me pick up writing in Korean at a fast rate in my recent years of self-improving my Korean language skills. Personally, I find spacing and spelling difficult. It is something I intend on getting better at. Also, I have improved my Korean writing in recent years through texting/typing. So, I would like to improve my handwriting more.
The basics of Korean writing is relatively easy as it consists of simple, compoundable consonant and vowel characters (ㄱ,ㄴ,ㄷ,ㄹ,ㅏ,ㅓ,ㅣ,ㅡ) invented based on mouth shapes upon pronunciation. The difficulty arises after one begins to construct phrases and sentences as spacing and grammar/spelling rules get complicated. This is also where even natives stumble. The Korean language consists of a lot of homonyms, homophone-like morpheme, and extremely detailed expressions. Examples consist of 눈 (eye or snow) and 안/않 (not a word but a morpheme). Some helpful pointers are understanding that English and Korean don’t share a syntactic order of subject, verb, object. Korean is generally S+O+V. It is also important to note that while English sentences can be spoken with a tone or accent to express different points of emphasis, Korean sentences can exchange the object and subject of a sentence (ex. Engish can’t do this, English can’t do this, English can’t do this vs. 영어는 이거 못하잖아, 못하잖아 영어는 이거, 이거 못하잖아 영어 - may not seem correct in an academic paper, but in colloquial speech, this happens often).
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