The idea of how Korean characters are created on a keyboard seems like a mystery for those of us that are accustomed to a US Keyboard. A brief explanation on the topic should clear things up for the average user.

The idea behind the input method for Korean is that by entering vowels and consonants like ㅎ ㅏ ㄴ ㄱ ㅜ ㄱ ㅇ ㅓ you can actually get the proper Korean Syllables like this 한국어.

The easiest way to think of the vowels and consonants is something like individual keystrokes that make up the syllables. The vowels and consonants really don’t have any meaning on their own. They are only stepping stones to achieve the syllables that form words.

It is hard to find an example in English since this is really a concept that doesn’t apply to our language but I came up with this. Let’s say we divided the word Print into strokes of your pen you would get this:

In closing, the Korean vowels and consonants are just the alphabetic characters that make  up the syllables.  Microsoft makes Input Method Editors available on it’s site. These tools allow you to input extended characters for complex languages.