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Why did Korean abandon Hanja?

  Tags: Hanja | Transparency | Korean
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Ishq
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 Message 57 of 116
11 September 2008 at 3:31am | IP Logged 
Deecab wrote:
autodidactic wrote:

The japanese use half the amount of kanjii that the chinese use. Their two syllablries
are amazingly efficient and logical.


Didn't I already mention Kanji? And while Kanas are quite good, their sound inventories are far too small to be efficient. They would have to make their vocabs long or use Kanji. They chose the latter option.

I am quite surprised that there are actually foreigners who think Hanja should be used though, considering Korean is not an easy language even without Hanja from Western point of view. One would imagine that they don't want to go through nightmare that they went through with Kanji and Hanzi.


The sound inventory of the Kanas are perfectly fine for Japanese. They corresponded with all the sounds used in the Japanese language and from my experience are much more regular than Hangeul. But they're both great for their own purposes, which is to express their respective languages.

And I'm not surprised at all at their being many students of Korean who would want the Korean language to use Hanja. Hanja from my point of view are very logical, concise, and give a great deal of clarity. My experience learning Chinese characters as a child wasn't a nightmare at all. The experience I would say felt about the same as being in any other class. Hanja aren’t some dreadful barriers that are so difficult that it makes life a living hell. They’re just glyphs that have sound and meaning. They aren’t conceptually that complex. Some people just make them out to seem just horrid. If they really were that horrid and difficult I doubt over 1 billion Chinese and over a hundred million Japanese could have learned them. I also think that most Chinese and Japanese students of Korean would also like for Korean to use Hanja because it would make things a bit easier for them. But Korean is the language of the Koreans and if at present they don't want to use Hanja then we should just let them do what they want. It is theirs, after all.

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Ishq
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 Message 58 of 116
11 September 2008 at 5:23am | IP Logged 
Deecab wrote:

But your personal experience doesn't represent the generalization of Chinese. I know plenty of Chinese who know how to speak but are not able to read and write.


Yes it's not generalization that's why I said, "from my personal experience." That was the point of mentioning that it was my personal experience, as not to infer that it was the general case. As for the Chinese people who you know who are illiterate in Chinese are they actually from Greater China and if so when did they leave? If they are American, or from any other country not in the Chinese influenced world, born then it seems very logical that they cannot read Chinese. If so they simply may not have had the environment to do so.

Deecab wrote:

Perhaps, but to display a counterexample, Hong Kong and Taiwan have plenty of illiterates as well.


But they are nowhere near the majority. Both locations have high literacy rates of approximately 95-97%. Being that I am of Hong Kong descent I can tell you that the majority of illiterates in Hong Kong are not Chinese. 5% of Hong Kong is comprised of non-Chinese who move to Hong Kong as adults. These illiterates are mostly immigrant workers who have never been in or have gotten a Hong Kong education. One cannot blame these people for being illiterate in Chinese. From the non-Chinese people I know in Hong Kong none are illiterate in the languages of the countries they hale from. As for Taiwan I would guess that those who are illiterate are more elderly people who at their time could not get the necessary amount education. The same I would guess would be true for illiterates in Korea or Japan. It's a small group that grew up in a different time.

Deecab wrote:

I was actually aware of what the norm is like. And yes, education is primarily the key but that doesn't mean that every writing is equally efficient. I used the word "norm" in the sense that's what the reality should be like. I didn't mean it to suggest that's actually the case. To me, the fact that a writing system is so difficult to make people functionally illiterate is beyond ridiculous. It defeats the purpose of communication with ease.


Okay, that makes no sense. The word norm refers to what is the actual approximated standard. If you meant should then you should have said, "the norm ought to be...". And what? No system is really that hard. If someone is illiterate it's either because they were extremely lazy or they simply lived in an environment that made learning difficult no matter the script. For example the illiterate people in India and Laos. Both countries have very easy phonetic scripts but have bad educational infrastructures causing high amounts of illiteracy.

Deecab wrote:

It's not as much about the matter of whether they can learn it as it has been about its usefulness. Koreans are intelligent, and are capable of learning them if they want to. They just don't have the motivation, which is arguably the most important factor when learning languages. I can somewhat see where people make the argument that Hanja is useless but I will always disagree with that statement since Hanja constitutes major component of our vocabulary.


Exactly, I'm not questioning whether Koreans can learn Hanja. I've been trying to defend that Koreans can learn Hanja and use them to their full potential if they wanted too. They just don't because most feel that it's unnecessary for most writing. But I think most realize that it is necessary if the text subject was important enough to need 100% clarification and was to be interpreted only in a certain way; for example the constitution. I don't think anyone wants there to be any ambiguity in that. So I think most Koreans deep down don't think they're completely useless. They do come in handy for things such as the constitution. I guess only time can tell what the fate of Hanja will be. Who knows maybe Hanja will have a renaissance and they'll pop up everywhere again someday or maybe the exact opposite and they'll just disappear from all forms of written Korean. Or a third option, things might just stay the status quo for a really long time.

Edited by Ishq on 11 September 2008 at 5:24am
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jstele
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 Message 59 of 116
12 September 2008 at 7:30am | IP Logged 
ChrisWebb wrote:
[QUOTE=aegi]
You claim that using hanja and hangul is actually the most efficient method, all I have to say on that is that if it's true you have no need to fear for Hanja's future, if not evolution will cull it just as surely as it does lame animals. I must admit the idea that Koreans need to keep Hanja in use to defend against Japan and China did make me chuckle though. Are you sure it's those 'slothful' Koreans who dont love hanja enough that are the real nationalists?


I think some of the commenters who argue that "Korea must use hanja" are doing so disingenuously. They don't really care whether Korean is efficient or not. Korea will never get rid of hanja 100%, so I don't know what the big deal is. We're talking about average, everyday people, not scholars who must read historical documents. As long as average people can live productively and communication is not a problem, what does it matter whether hanja is used more or less? Hanja is used to supplement some words when clarity is needed, but it doesn't need to be used that often. Why make things more complex?

It's cultural imperialism or ignorance to reproach Koreans for not using more hanja when the society communicates just fine without it. Foreign languages should not be imposed on other societies. As long as the Korean language serves the people in Korea well, that is all that matters. Even if it didn't, it is up to that society, not anyone else to dictate how it should be.
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skeeterses
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 Message 60 of 116
15 September 2008 at 9:27pm | IP Logged 
I'll throw in my 2 cents on the matter of Hanjas.

I've done a great deal of reading in Korean and consider myself one of the people who could, with the help of a
dictionary of course, read this kind of thread in Korean. The Koreans of course don't consider Hanjas to be
necessary since most of their literature and signs are all written in Hangul. But they have one advantage that
foreigners living in Korea don't have; and that happens to be full immersion in the language. Most of the
bilingual Koreans are not anxious to speak to English speaking foreigners in Korean. But I believe that getting a
grasp of the vocabulary is possible.

I know I'm stating the obvious here but over half of the vocabulary in the Korean language has Chinese roots and
to really get the words down, a person learning Korean has to be familiar with the Hanjas. Look at it this way.
The Korean language is a non Indo-European language which means that it's vocabulary is not going to
share any of the latin or french roots that make up a good number of English words. Hanjas are one of the tools
that Non-Koreans should use in order to learn the roots and tackle the vocabulary. Even if you don't plan to
write down the hanjas 50 times like the Korean schoolkids, its important to write the Hanjas next to your
vocabulary words so that you can compare words and learn to pick out roots.

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ChrisWebb
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 Message 61 of 116
16 September 2008 at 4:57am | IP Logged 
skeeterses wrote:
I'll throw in my 2 cents on the matter of Hanjas.

I've done a great deal of reading in Korean and consider myself one of the people who could, with the help of a
dictionary of course, read this kind of thread in Korean. The Koreans of course don't consider Hanjas to be
necessary since most of their literature and signs are all written in Hangul. But they have one advantage that
foreigners living in Korea don't have; and that happens to be full immersion in the language. Most of the
bilingual Koreans are not anxious to speak to English speaking foreigners in Korean. But I believe that getting a
grasp of the vocabulary is possible.

I know I'm stating the obvious here but over half of the vocabulary in the Korean language has Chinese roots and
to really get the words down, a person learning Korean has to be familiar with the Hanjas. Look at it this way.
The Korean language is a non Indo-European language which means that it's vocabulary is not going to
share any of the latin or french roots that make up a good number of English words. Hanjas are one of the tools
that Non-Koreans should use in order to learn the roots and tackle the vocabulary. Even if you don't plan to
write down the hanjas 50 times like the Korean schoolkids, its important to write the Hanjas next to your
vocabulary words so that you can compare words and learn to pick out roots.


My only real question would be if you actually need to know the Hanjas themselves to achieve this? Surely learning the various meanings in Hangul and how to recognise them in Hangul gets you pretty much everything that learning the Hanjas themselves does in terms of vocabulary acquisition?

Maybe I'm missing a trick here because I just can't see a real need to learn Hanja to learn vocabulary, in the same way, learning to read Greek to recognise the Greek components ( prefixes and the like ) in English would be overkill, it's enough to recognise them as they are written in English.

Edited by ChrisWebb on 16 September 2008 at 4:58am
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Jiwon
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 Message 62 of 116
16 September 2008 at 7:02am | IP Logged 
ChrisWebb wrote:
skeeterses wrote:
I'll throw in my 2 cents on the matter of Hanjas.

I've done a great deal of reading in Korean and consider myself one of the people who could, with the help of a
dictionary of course, read this kind of thread in Korean. The Koreans of course don't consider Hanjas to be
necessary since most of their literature and signs are all written in Hangul. But they have one advantage that
foreigners living in Korea don't have; and that happens to be full immersion in the language. Most of the
bilingual Koreans are not anxious to speak to English speaking foreigners in Korean. But I believe that getting a
grasp of the vocabulary is possible.

I know I'm stating the obvious here but over half of the vocabulary in the Korean language has Chinese roots and
to really get the words down, a person learning Korean has to be familiar with the Hanjas. Look at it this way.
The Korean language is a non Indo-European language which means that it's vocabulary is not going to
share any of the latin or french roots that make up a good number of English words. Hanjas are one of the tools
that Non-Koreans should use in order to learn the roots and tackle the vocabulary. Even if you don't plan to
write down the hanjas 50 times like the Korean schoolkids, its important to write the Hanjas next to your
vocabulary words so that you can compare words and learn to pick out roots.


My only real question would be if you actually need to know the Hanjas themselves to achieve this? Surely learning the various meanings in Hangul and how to recognise them in Hangul gets you pretty much everything that learning the Hanjas themselves does in terms of vocabulary acquisition?

Maybe I'm missing a trick here because I just can't see a real need to learn Hanja to learn vocabulary, in the same way, learning to read Greek to recognise the Greek components ( prefixes and the like ) in English would be overkill, it's enough to recognise them as they are written in English.


That's something I've been trying to get across to the forum members for months. Unfortunately, not many of them share this viewpoint, and some tend to believe that learning Hanja for Korean is absolutely necessary while learning Greek and Latin word roots for English is not.
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skeeterses
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 Message 63 of 116
16 September 2008 at 7:08am | IP Logged 
I think Professor Arguilles himself would be the best one to answer the question of whether someone needs to
learn Hanjas in order to master the Korean vocabulary.

But onto the European languages themselves. I think what happens when you learn a first language is that the
mind internalizes a lot of the roots and so we recognize words in English and in other European languages that
share common roots and we probably don't think about it conciously unless we actually spend the time to learn
Latin and Greek. In one of my adult classes, I met a student who had pretty good English and he actually spent the
time to learn the latin roots for a lot of the English words. It must have helped him on his English.

There are other tricks to learning Korean vocabulary. Some of the Korean words I've been able to memorize by
making nemonics for. Some words of course you learn by using every day (sheer repetition). Knowing the Chinese
roots for a lot of the Korean words is another trick in the bag.
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TKK
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 Message 64 of 116
24 September 2008 at 4:34am | IP Logged 
for example,

1, 유학 (幼學)
2, 유학 (幽壑)
3, 유학 (留學)
4, 유학 (遊學)
5, 유학 (儒學)

can you distinguish them at once according to context? especially between 3 & 4?

3, 유학 (留學) means "go abroad to study".
4, 유학 (遊學) means "study away from home, travel to some places to study, maybe abroad, & maybe in homeland".

so, I still think the tiny difference can only be distinguished by keeping "Hanja"(Chinese characters) in the articles.


Edited by TKK on 24 September 2008 at 4:35am


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