Korean Job Discussion Forums

[waggo]

Even though I have been studying Korean for a few years now, I havent really done much writing.

I guess Im just looking for a few morsels of tried and tested advice from anybody who has some experience of writing in hangul.

I have the TOPIK exam on Sunday so I'd like to wish anyone else taking the exam good luck.

[Atavistic]

[laogaiguk]

[Underwaterbob]

Do you mean the actual physical process of creating the characters or more general writing style?

[Hairy Jim]

Try learning the correct stroke order of each character ("Survival Korean" by Stephen Revere will teach u and rest of the books pretty good). You'll find it will make your writing look more like a Korean's than if u just try to copy it.

[Atavistic]

[Hater Depot]

There is a definite difference between writing and speaking styles in Korean. Read a newspaper article and then a blog post and you will be immediately struck by it.

[PeteJB]

Korean handwriting though is a real challenge. Block writing is my style. I have bad handwriting in any language, so I have little optimism for being able to write that cool "handwritten" style Korean you see on movie titles.

[ajgeddes]

Come on people. This guy is not asking how to write hangul characters. He has been studying the language for a few years, not minutes.

[Underwaterbob]

[billybrobby]

When I started out learning Korean, I learned the characters by sight and then did most of my writing on the computer. So I managed to go for years without knowing how to write them. Even now, I write very poorly. I've even gotten worse at writing in English because all my work is on the computer. Anyways, it doesn't take long to learn, and it's true that it affects your ability to write handwritten Korean

http://www.lifeinkorea.com/Language/korean.cfm?Subject=writing

Regarding writing style, there are some differences, but too many for me to mention off the top of my head. You see "and" as 와/과 or 및 but you don't hear this much. Certain words like 밝혔습니다 generally only appear in news reports. In written speech, they'll create a causual relationship with 해 instead of 해서 or 하니까. "등" meaning "et cetera" seems much more common. And of course there there is the basic difference that people tend to be more verbose but more organized in written stuff. But there aren't so many differences that reading a few news articles woudn't catch you up pretty quickly.

[billybrobby]

Looking back at the OP, I don't think I gave the answer he was looking for. It's true, the question is unclear.

[laogaiguk]

The mere thought that people are having trouble with stroke order of hangeul is somewhat a shock to me, having learned Japanese and Chinese. Still, it is useful to learn, but really shouldn't be that hard.

I actually write my English letters (especially the capital I) in a different way now...

[pkang0202]

There is a Korean version of "cursive" writing. I sure as hell can't decipher it.

[yingwenlaoshi]