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Is the difficulty of Korean overrated? | ||
Tags: Korean | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| skeeterses Senior Member United States angelfire.com/games5Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6647 days ago 302 posts - 356 votes  1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Spanish | Message 41 of 58 09 February 2012 at 2:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I took a look at the link to Gerry's blog and I had copied down material from his site before. As Gerry might tell
you, the real difficulty with Korean is the various ways of saying one thing, and the particular link that Bao posted was to a November 2005 entry where there were various uses of the word 먹다 being used in combinations with other words, different reflexive pronouns, and a small list of words/expressions on KoreanLab website that just are spoken quite a bit but not written a lot. In fact, one time, I copied about 400 slang/idiomatic expressions from a particular entry on his site (I'll link to it later on.). Gerry also uses hanjas to explain the 4 letter Chinese idioms that Koreans sometimes use. On newspapers, the Korean newspapers haven't used hanjas since 1995. Naver has an online library of old Korean newspapers written between 1950 and 2000. I personally find the hanjas to be enjoyable to learn, even if they're only used in old newspapers and religious books. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| 이희선 Groupie Australia Joined 4998 days ago 56 posts - 97 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 42 of 58 09 February 2012 at 3:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Sorry, but I have direct evidence to the contrary. While Hanja isn't used in most newspapers these days, its not true that 1995 was somehow a cut-off date for using Hanja. 
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| skeeterses Senior Member United States angelfire.com/games5Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6647 days ago 302 posts - 356 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Spanish | Message 43 of 58 09 February 2012 at 3:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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What I was referring to was the vertical format where a large portion of the text is written in hanjas. Take a look at
this link, http://newslibrary.naver.com/search/searchByDate.nhn . 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kprkr Tetraglot Newbie Korea, South Joined 4702 days ago 1 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Shanghainese, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 44 of 58 09 February 2012 at 3:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've been reading this thread for a few days now and frankly I'm a bit surprised. 이희선 is absolutely right. Hanja is
used a far amount all over Korea. I'm not sure how it could be missed, especially after even a short time living here.
In that case it's only 3 characters you need to know: 大 中 小. In fact, in many cases, if you don't know the hanja you may not in face be able to read an article in the paper. Chosun Ilbo is known as the more conservatice of the major papers. They regularly include hanja in articles. A headline like "美 invades 中 today" is all but meaningless if you don't know who 美 and 中 are. These are just the most common.
This is also patently false, as I mentioned above. I pick up the newspaper literally every day and find hanja strewn throughout. You can say they haven't been majority-hanja since 1995, but it's just not true that hanja aren't used. I'm sure I can find an example today and upload a photo if you'd like. The four-letter (character) idioms mentioned are called "chengyu" in Chinese. I've seen these employed more than once on subway billboards where, without knowing the hanja, one would definitely not be able to make any sense of the advertisement. The one I remember most recently seeing was at the subway station by Coex, and area with a high volume of foot traffic covering all ages and income levels. So clearly we can't assume that only the super- educated know any hanja. Students are required to learn a fair amount, though not more than 1000 if I remember correctly. Others take special tests to recieve cards for their wallets certifying that they know more than 2500 or so. How many hanja you know is a sense of pride for many. I'm a Chinese speaker. I can't tell you the number of people who learn Chinese but never bother to learn to read or if they do learn basic reading, they never actually use and develop that skill. The result is that most locals don't bother having any real connection with them, and friendships remain superficial. You're a novelty: the foreigner who (kinda) speaks their language. The people I know who have real friendships are the ones that can read and take in the language on a slightly more cultured level, even if that's just reading newspapers instead of K-pop blogs. This is true of any language. If you're learning a language for the sake of saying "I speak Farsi" at parties in Manhattan, then things like hanja don't matter. High levels of formality don't matter, so don't waste your time. If your goal is to really connect with people in their language and their culture, you need to take the extra step of becoming truly literate in their language. In that sense, the difficuly of Korean may not be overrated, but rather the difficulty of Spanish might be totally underrated. Pick up JL Borges or GG Marquéz next time you see a Spanish language book store and see how much it looks like a blog. Odysseus was right that
I'd ammend that to say it's not just 'academic' or 'technical' but literary as well. For your purposes (plural, non-specific 'you'), you may very well be able to skip hanja. But you can't say it's not used. This is an interesting topic in general. To touch on the actual topic a bit more directly, i think the difficulty is overrated, but only because I think all languages are difficult. It's just a matter of spending the time needed to learn it to meet your goal. I for one thing the levels of formality in Korean are excellent. They're difficult because they're different than my native language, but actually I think for the learner they're easier than doing the same thing in English where a whole new set of vocabulary and tone is needed. I'd much rather just change my verb endings and have it be consistent throughout, which is my impression of Korean thus far. Balliballi: Good luck on your studies. You probably have learned a lot of Korean in your time here already without even knowing it. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kadiz1108 Diglot Newbie Korea, South Joined 4724 days ago 5 posts - 11 votes Speaks: Korean*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 45 of 58 20 February 2012 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well, as a Korean native, I haven't really thought about the amount of hanjas used in modern Korean. Actually, it is pretty interesting that almost every Korean related discussion ended up arguing about whether or not learning hanja is inevitable in learning Korean. First, I agree with 이희선's opinion in the sense that there are some necessities to know some hanjas for the situations which she (I assumed it from the name, correct me if I was wrong) explained in detail. (大/中/小 for sizes, 美/中 for countries etc.) However, in my opinion, the role of hanja in modern Korean ends there. Probably no more than 50~150 basic hanjas are all you need for reading, writing, and speaking as fluent as a Korean does. I'm pretty sure that most of the college-graduated average Korean doesn’t know more than those 'everyday hanja' which is almost impossible to avoid in everyday life. Even though I've got to know more than 1800+ hanja (or kanji) through learning Japanese, it doesn't make me better Korean speaker than those who don't know a lot of hanja. As a matter of homonyms, which is just too much worried about over and over again, I don't think that lack of hanja in Korean writing is the problem. In fact, reading is not different from listening, so when you can listen to something in Korean and understand, there will be no problem in understanding the same sentences written in Korean. Then, how are you going to distinguish all the homonyms when you cannot ‘listen to’ hanja? The best way to overcome this are getting used to it in sentences and try to figure out the meaning through context. Sounds familiar? Surely, it is the most common way to learn other languages. What make Korean hard to get are numerous endings/verb conjugations and mostly the sentence structure which is completely different from that of English (or all the languages other than Japanese). Also, the way that we think and make sentences is just totally different, and it certainly is a huge hurdle to even advanced learners. Studying grammars and memorizing all the vocabularies inside out might guarantee success in Spanish or Italian which share the same roots with English (I actually learned Japanese this way), but once you get out of your language comfort zone, it doesn’t work that easily. It’s from my experiences of learning English, which I’m still struggling with. FSI level also works in backwards indeed. So, don't be frustrated! There are more than millions of people only in Korea who could sell their soul just to get English. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| skeeterses Senior Member United States angelfire.com/games5Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6647 days ago 302 posts - 356 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Spanish | Message 46 of 58 21 February 2012 at 3:25am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Kadiz, I've been learning the hanjas mainly to read specific texts like the Korean Bible and the pre-1995 Korean
newspapers. But onto the Korean grammar and sentence endings, I have been using the Ganada Korean for Foreigners text as a reference and have typed phrases into the Naver dictionary and copying Korean expressions from that to get a better understanding of the nuances in Korean. How do those sources stack up in learning the complexity of this language? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| 이희선 Groupie Australia Joined 4998 days ago 56 posts - 97 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 47 of 58 21 February 2012 at 5:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Great post! Yes, I am a woman ^^ I have asked some of my native-speaker Korean friends recently how many hanja they remember. All are in their 20's. And the general answer is that they think they know about 100-200, and as you say, are probably the ones you run into most frequently from seeing it on a random sign or advertisement or other daily life situations. I enjoy knowing the few hanja that I do know, and think it helps with understanding word roots and patterns - even though it seems like more to learn, I think it helps make Korean easier! The thing I do find the hardest is the different constructions of sentences, the indirectness, and the usage of grammar in defining mood, and respect, and all those other subtleties that are done differently in American English :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kadiz1108 Diglot Newbie Korea, South Joined 4724 days ago 5 posts - 11 votes Speaks: Korean*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 48 of 58 22 February 2012 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think you're doing great! Checking out the usages of expressions/words in the sentences will help you a lot to get to know more comprehensive meaning of the expressions. Although I'm not really an expert on teaching/learning Korean, I would recommend you to practice speaking Korean as much as possible. I've seen so many foreigners having trouble in speaking, yet they were good at other stuff like reading and writing. I suppose it surely is a common thing for any language learners whose target language is far from one's mother tongue. Especially, usage of respect and subtle changes in endings are something that hard to get and use unless you are really used to. Edited by kadiz1108 on 22 February 2012 at 3:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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