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This is getting off-topic, but as a native Korean speaker, I'd say Hanja ("Chinese characters" used in Korean) is overrated. :) (I do think some amount of Hanj

by yongjik 13y ago

This is getting off-topic, but as a native Korean speaker, I'd say Hanja ("Chinese characters" used in Korean) is overrated. :) (I do think some amount of Hanja education helps learning more Korean words, but using them in everyday documents is another matter.) Some newspapers banished Hanja entirely in 1988, when many old-generation scholars decried the sorry state of Hanja education and the impending downfall of the Korean culture. That didn't happen, and one by one, those newspapers that ran the op-eds of worried scholars followed suit, a process hastened by the introduction of the internet. (Writing Chinese characters with a keyboard isn't really an easy process. Especially when you're speaking Korean: you type Korean first and then have to convert each word to Chinese, so why bother?) Nowadays, Korean culture is just as strong as before, Korean dramas are popular in China, and many official documents are arguably much easier to understand than in the 80s, partly thanks to the efforts to banish esoteric jargons that nobody could understand without writing in Hanja (and only poorly understood even when written in Hanja: think about it, you can't understand what a telephone is even if you know the Ancient Greek words for "far" and "voice". You could only have a vague guess.) On top of that, many of these "esoteric jargons" were direct import from written Japanese words during the colonization period, so they were never a proper Korean word outside a small group of people.

bane 13y ago
Please feel free to jump in if I'm misrepresenting your language at all! My Korean is personally pretty bad, but I find language features interesting enough and spending the 3 or 4 days it took to learn Hangul made my times in Korea much better (as well as giving me a great admiration for the alphabet). I remember back even in the mid to late 90s seeing Hanja in the local Korean newspapers, but these days they seem pretty much absent. My wife (who has a pretty good memory for Hanja) laments the inability to figure out homophones sometimes though. In the North, my understanding is that Hanja has effectively been eliminated for quite a while and things written in the North are pretty much 100% Hangul (as well as some Korean original neologisms to get rid of Japanese and English loan words).
T-R 13y ago
I can't really speak to the utility of using the characters in practice, but looking back on when I was studying Japanese and Korean, it frustrates me that more emphasis wasn't put on the characters, as learning the roots of the words was incredibly helpful in learning vocabulary, in the same way that learning Latin roots would be helpful in studying English. It was, though, much more of an issue in Japanese, where you run into the characters everywhere. Because of the heavy conversational emphasis in most foreign language classes, I didn't learn about character composition (radicals), or the phonetic element to characters until I took a bit of Chinese. When I did finally learn these things, my reading comprehension got a very significant boost. I'd maybe argue that the use of Chinese characters in Japanese allows me to read much faster than if all writing were in Hiragana, particularly since people tend to identify words more by their shape, but Hangul does this quite well on its own, so I think maybe there's not as strong of a need for it in Korean.
- yongjik 13y ago
  One theory I heard was that Japanese has a rather limited set of syllables, so the ambiguity is greater. In spoken Japanese some of the ambiguity would be resolved by pitch accent, but accent is not written in Hiragana/Katakana. On the other hand, Korean has a relatively large number of syllables (so less ambiguity), and modern Korean spelling system is highly morphophonemic (which is a fancy way of saying "words that sound the same in a form may still be written differently, depending on how they sound in other forms"), which also helps a bit. For example, the words 낫 (scythe) 낮 (day) 낯 (face) all sound the same when in isolation (or when followed by a consonant), but sound different when followed by a vowel.

by yongjik 13y ago

bane 13y ago

Please feel free to jump in if I'm misrepresenting your language at all! My Korean is personally pretty bad, but I find language features interesting enough and spending the 3 or 4 days it took to learn Hangul made my times in Korea much better (as well as giving me a great admiration for the alphabet). I remember back even in the mid to late 90s seeing Hanja in the local Korean newspapers, but these days they seem pretty much absent. My wife (who has a pretty good memory for Hanja) laments the inability to figure out homophones sometimes though. In the North, my understanding is that Hanja has effectively been eliminated for quite a while and things written in the North are pretty much 100% Hangul (as well as some Korean original neologisms to get rid of Japanese and English loan words).

T-R 13y ago

I can't really speak to the utility of using the characters in practice, but looking back on when I was studying Japanese and Korean, it frustrates me that more emphasis wasn't put on the characters, as learning the roots of the words was incredibly helpful in learning vocabulary, in the same way that learning Latin roots would be helpful in studying English. It was, though, much more of an issue in Japanese, where you run into the characters everywhere. Because of the heavy conversational emphasis in most foreign language classes, I didn't learn about character composition (radicals), or the phonetic element to characters until I took a bit of Chinese. When I did finally learn these things, my reading comprehension got a very significant boost. I'd maybe argue that the use of Chinese characters in Japanese allows me to read much faster than if all writing were in Hiragana, particularly since people tend to identify words more by their shape, but Hangul does this quite well on its own, so I think maybe there's not as strong of a need for it in Korean.

yongjik 13y ago
One theory I heard was that Japanese has a rather limited set of syllables, so the ambiguity is greater. In spoken Japanese some of the ambiguity would be resolved by pitch accent, but accent is not written in Hiragana/Katakana. On the other hand, Korean has a relatively large number of syllables (so less ambiguity), and modern Korean spelling system is highly morphophonemic (which is a fancy way of saying "words that sound the same in a form may still be written differently, depending on how they sound in other forms"), which also helps a bit. For example, the words 낫 (scythe) 낮 (day) 낯 (face) all sound the same when in isolation (or when followed by a consonant), but sound different when followed by a vowel.