Free Korean Typing Practice

Rules: what is measured and what counts as a mistake

Type the sentence on screen exactly as shown. You get three numbers back: speed in strokes per minute (the number of correctly typed letter parts per minute), accuracy as the share of committed input that was correct, and one of eight grades assigned by speed band. If accuracy falls below 90%, a warning appears next to the grade.

Speed is counted by breaking each submitted syllable into its letter parts. A sentence with more final consonants and compound vowels therefore takes more keystrokes per character, and a short sprint and a long steady run are compared on the same scale. It is also why these numbers cannot be compared directly with English WPM.

Wrong characters are marked on screen and lower your accuracy, but practice keeps going. Every typo is stored as data about which finger and which letter you miss most, and that data drives the weak-word drills.

Controls: switch on your system's Korean input method

• Set your computer's input language to Korean (Dubeolsik), click the input box and start typing. The timer starts on your first keystroke.
• While a syllable is being assembled (for example ㄱ → 가 → 각), the input method handles it, so correctness is judged on finished syllables.
• Tense consonants and the vowels ㅒ and ㅖ are typed with Shift. The standard technique is to press Shift with the little finger of the hand opposite the key.
• In position drills the on-screen keyboard highlights the next key and the finger that should press it.
• For precise measurement a physical keyboard is recommended; on a phone it works best as light practice.

Strategy: speed follows accuracy

The Dubeolsik home row puts the left hand on ㅁ, ㄴ, ㅇ, ㄹ and the right hand on ㅓ, ㅏ, ㅣ and the key beside them. Most keyboards have a small bump on the ㄹ (F) and ㅓ (J) keys, so you can find your place again without looking down. The left hand handles consonants and the right hand vowels, so typing is fastest when the two hands alternate.

For the first few weeks, type only as fast as you can while staying above 95% accuracy. Correcting typos costs more time than speed saves, and a wrong motion that becomes habit is much harder to unlearn. Once accuracy is steady, speed rises with practice on its own.

Short and often beats long and rare. Five to ten minutes a day, alternating position drills and word drills, with a long passage once or twice a week to check stamina, is a routine that is easy to keep. The practice calendar shows in numbers the difference between days you skipped and days you kept going.

History: from typewriter layout debates to a computer standard

Typing Korean by machine was hard from the start. Letters are grouped into syllables, so the same consonant can belong in a different position depending on whether it starts or ends a syllable. In 1949 the ophthalmologist Gong Byeong-u introduced a three-set (Sebeolsik) typewriter with separate keys for initial, medial and final letters, making fast Korean typing practical.

Many layouts competed after that. The government set a standard typewriter layout in 1969, then in 1982 designated the two-set Dubeolsik layout, which splits keys into consonants and vowels, as the national standard. That standard, now KS X 5002, settled in with the spread of personal computers and is the layout on almost every keyboard sold in Korea today.

In the 1990s typing tutors spread through schools and homes along with PCs, and their mix of short passages, long passages, words and position drills remains the basic structure of typing practice. QuizLab keeps that familiar structure and adds a published measurement method, dictation and transcription cards.

Questions about typing skill and practice habits

What counts as a fast speed?

On QuizLab's eight-step grade table, 300 strokes per minute reaches 일반인 (everyday typist), 400 숙련가 (skilled), 500 고수 (expert), 600 타자왕 (typing king) and 700 or more 자판의 마술사 (keyboard magician). Below 100 you start at 독수리 타법 (hunt and peck). These figures use QuizLab's letter-part formula, so they cannot be lined up directly against numbers from other typing services.

Is it all right to look at the keyboard while typing?

It is fine at first, but if it becomes a habit your speed plateaus, because your eyes spend time travelling between screen and keys on every character. Typing while following the finger guide on the on-screen keyboard in position drills gradually breaks the habit of looking down.