타자연습

Thank goodness I learned touch typing back some ten years ago, otherwise high school and college would have been a very painful experience.  Much, in fact, like the experience I’m having typing in Korean right now.

For the past year, I’ve been using the “soft” (i.e. onscreen) Korean keyboard that comes with the Microsoft Windows IME – so basically, using my mouse to input each Hangeul character.  It’s slow and unnecessarily abusive to my poor index finger.  My netbook, which runs Windows 7, doesn’t come with the soft keyboard so I finally have to face the harsh reality of learning how to type again.  This time, in Korean.

A while back, I made my own Hangeul stickers and had them on my keyboard for a couple months before they all started to fall off.  That gave me a general idea of where all the characters are but unfortunately my speed and accuracy are nowhere near that of my English typing ability.  This clearly has to change or I’ll start to hate typing in Korean, which means I’ll start to hate looking up stuff on the internet on my own, which means I won’t study as much.  And that’s bad. >:(

But look what I found while browsing through the kids section at Daum!

 타자연습 (click!)

It’s your standard typing game.  You can chose to work on different sets of keys, an entire row, and/or simple words.

Individual characters are fine but typing full words are still really hard for me.

The only criticism I have is that game doesn’t actually teach you which fingers go with which key (i.e. pinky finger for ㅂ ㅁ ㅋ ) but if you are familiar with QWERTY keyboarding in English, it shouldn’t be a problem to carry that over to Korean.

I still have a long way to go till I can comfortably type in Korean but I guess practice makes perfect.  One more thing to add to my ever growing list of Things to Accomplish in 2012. ^^