The shape of 진짜

You have heard jinjja in every episode you have ever watched, usually with a face. By the end of today you will be able to write it — 진짜 — and read it in a subtitle.

This course is really about speech levels — why the same sentence can be warm, distant or insulting depending on one syllable. But that comes in week two. First, the letters.

English writes letters in a line: j-i-n-j-j-a. Korean stacks the letters of one syllable into one square block.

So 진짜 is not six letters. It is two syllables, each drawn in its own square: