Re:Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
by xodn348 on Saturday March 14, 2026 @06:49PM
(#47382126)
만나서 반가워요!
What you talked is mostly right and I did not know about typing in Korean, the left-hand side and right-hand side. Btw, Consonant(Jaeum) and vowel(Moeum).
In experience-wise, what you had would be precise.
Re:Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
by lunarboy on Saturday March 14, 2026 @08:29PM
(#47382905)
It's fascinating and lucky how well Korean fits into a keyboard designed for English. Japanese and Chinese are notoriously inefficient to type.
Re:Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
by numpad0 on Sunday March 15, 2026 @12:30AM
(#47384370)
The modern Korean Hangul script is phonographic, meaning it encodes sounds rather than ideas. Apparently that's good enough, or at least works better than how pure phonetic transcripts work for Japanese and Chinese languages, both of which users rejected that idea. But it was also a result of a relatively recent switch from Hanzi-Hangul mixed script used under Japanese occupation.
Re:Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
by zlfn on Sunday March 15, 2026 @03:54AM
(#47385223)
Actually, the use of Hanza(Hanzi)-Hangul mixed script wasn't exactly a byproduct of the Japanese occupation. (In fact, Japanese was the official language back then lol)
People started moving away from using difficult-to-type Hanza as soon as the typewriter was introduced. As computerization progressed, the transition naturally continued until Hanza was phased out of most documents. Even so, it has only been about 40 years since Hanza disappeared from everyday daily life.
The main benefit of Korean actually comes from the fact that the language itself fits perfectly into a standard 27 alphabet keys and laid out in such a way that lets you type ridiculously fast. The consonant letters are always situated in the left half and the vowels are in the right half of the keyboard. This means it is extremely easy to train muscle memory because you’re mostly alternating keystrokes on your left hand and right hand.
Anecdotally I feel like when I’m typing in English, each half of my brain needs to coordinate more compared to when I’m typing in Korean, the right brain only need to remember the consonant positions for my left hand and my left brain only need to remember the vowel positions.