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Is the difficulty of Korean overrated? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| LuckyNomad Groupie Korea, South Joined 6376 days ago 79 posts - 89 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 49 of 58 02 March 2012 at 5:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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Is the difficulty of Korean overrated?
I don't think so. I've been living in Korea for five and a half years now. I've been married to a korean for nearly three years. I have rarely talked to non-koreans during my time in Korea. Since I got here I have studied the language on my own constantly. Especially during the first three years where the majority of my day was hours and hours of studying every day. Am I fluent? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It seems like I'm running a race where the finish line keeps moving. I kinda think that if I had, for example, studied Spanish in mexico for the same amount of time with the same circumstances, that I'd be like a native by now. With Korean, I don't believe that I'll be like a native speaker after my tenth year here. I'll let you guys know at that time. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4721 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 50 of 58 04 March 2012 at 6:31am | IP Logged | |||||
kprkr said:
You are overstating the case. You may not be able to read SOME sentences in a newspaper but to say you will not be able to read an article in the paper is far-fetched. The Hanja that is used in newspapers is there some of the time, if not most of the time, for disambiguation purposes. The Hanja that appears in Korean newspapers makes up less than 1% of the word content of the average newspaper. Sure, if you do not know Hanja, you will not be able to fully understand the sentences which contain Hanja (these comprise about 1% or less of the sentences in total of a newspaper on average) but you can make out the gist of the sentence from the Korean words in that sentence. Here are some examples of articles from Korean newspapers. 
In the last one, there are a couple of Hanja words, but as you can see, even without knowing the meaning of these words, you can understand the article. In the example that 이희선 posted: 
You can still understand the article even though you do not know the Hanja words. In another image posted by 이희선: 
the Hanja that is there is mainly there for disambiguation reasons. The Hanja words are in parentheses. Even if you did not know the Hanja words, you would still be able to fully understand the article. The number of Hanja words used in Korean newspapers these days make up only a tiny percentage of the words used in a newspaper, and in many cases, they appear there for disambiguation purposes (I repeat), eg. showing the Chinese characters of a person's name. Online examples of Korean news. http://world.kbs.co.kr/korean/ As you can see, you have to go through the newspaper with a fine-tooth comb to find Hanja, if there is, indeed, any to be found. Go to an article in that site randomly, http://world.kbs.co.kr/korean/news/news_IK_detail.htm?No=180 966&id=IK and the same thing. You can absolutely read and understand the article without understanding a word of Hanja. (If the link doesn't work, you can easily find other links from the main page.) Click on the Korean version of the online Chosun Ilbo: http://www.chosun.com/ and the same thing, hardly any Hanja to be found, and even if it's there in an article or in the title of an article (click on a link, any link on the front page, and open up an article), you can still read and understand the title and the main body of the article. Here is an example from Chosun Ilbo: http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2012/03/04/2012030 400357.html?news_Head1 Every newspaper I looked at, I looked at six on the plane and I had a couple at home, did not contain a significant amount of Hanja and the presence of Hanja when it did appear, usually in miniscule quantities, was not sufficient to hamper the reading and comprehension of the article by those unfamiliar with Hanja. kprkr said:
That's beside the point. It doesn't matter how hard or how easy it is to learn Chinese characters, you don't need to know them to read Korean newspapers and to get by in Korea. You can spend your whole life not being able to read any Hanja as a Korean native person and you wouldn't have a problem understanding written things (unless you are a graduate student, an academic, etc). (As far as I know, Hanja is no longer a compulsory subject in schools any more but an elective subject in middle school - but I am not sure about this.) It's almost the same as the Chinese writing in the US. You may see it on the signage of Chinese restaurants but you do not need to know how to read Chinese in order to go to a Chinese restaurant. Well, it's the same with the Hanja on the signage of beauty shops, ramen packets and other food packets. These are mostly background "visual noise" just like the Chinese on the signage of Chinese restaurants (and the words when they appear on food packets etc are only there singly in a sentence. The rest of the sentence is in Hangeul.) The only problem might be if you go to a restaurant and it has the serving sizes in Hanja or if you are trying to buy rubber gloves and the sizes are in Hanja. Those might be the only times that you need to know Hanja in practical life. But once again, you can easily overcome these problems by asking someone about it or you can work it out, especially in the case of menu serving sizes. Now, 30-40 years ago, the situation was different. You would probably have to know Hanja to read THIS: http://newslibrary.naver.com/search/searchByDate.nhn (from skeeterses' post) 
(at least the titles and the first sentences of the articles anyway, because if you look at the articles in the link above closely, most of the Hanja is in the titles and opening sentences of the articles and they don't appear very much in the body of the articles, so at a pinch you might be able to understand a newspaper article from this era without knowing any Hanja.) Edited by Balliballi on 05 March 2012 at 9:58am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| jtdotto Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5258 days ago 73 posts - 172 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, German | Message 51 of 58 13 March 2012 at 8:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm kind of late to this party, as I usually am with the Korean threads on this board, but I feel like I've got an interesting perspective, so here it goes...
My background: I have studied Korean for 3 and 1/2 years. I spent 10 months at Yonsei University studying at the Korean language institute there. For 6 of those months I trained taekwondo at Korea National Sport Univesity with the very elite of the Korean taekwondo athlete population. This is relevant because these guys are the best of the best - so good in fact that they've never studied English (which is very uncommom for people in their early 20's nowadays). They've never studied because they've been busy with taekwondo their entire lives. Through this experience I really learned how to speak Korean. After my exchange program I returned home and spent the last 2 years hanging out with Koreans, dating Korean girls, reading and studying on my own, taking classes etc. Having just arrived in Korea two weeks ago for a year long teaching contract, I am at the point with Korean where it is now more comfortable, and indeed fruitful for the both of us, for both parties to converse in Korean than in English (unless that speaker is exceptionally good at English). I can find my way through news articles that are far away from politics and business, I've read through an entire novel in a week (albeit I had picked out all the words in the book I didn't know and made a list for reading), blurbs in advertisements, on the subway, online, blogs, etc., are enjoyable for me to read and actually transmit information. It may take some analysis on my part for more complex sentences, but I can infer the meaning of most words I don't know. And I know I'm pretty dead on most of the time. How do I do this? Well, experience for one. But with regards to 한자 and 한문 specifically, it is because I have learned the meanings of single 한자 - without learning how to write them! Take something like 중, which means middle. Middle 중간 - middle + middle, concentrate 집중 - not sure + middle, focus on 중점 - middle + not sure, etc. I know 중, and I've seen these words enough to make the connection. I've done this for many single syllables, and I've gotten pretty good at making the internal connections. Now I don't doubt that learning 한자 would help incredibly, and I do have plans to learn the meanings of 한자. But from where I am at right now, it would be almost more effacious for me to just learn the meanings (the double, triple, quadruple meanings as well) of singular syllables and connect them to known words than trying to learn the stroke orders and spending hours repeating the same small pictograms. I want to read novels and papers, and if I run into a 한자 heavy page, I would probably retire from reading that material for the time being. I want to read what helps, and I want to enjoy reading. In short, if you can create an internal dictionary of the different meanings certain syllables carry, this goes a long way towards comprehension. Obviously this is not an end, but it is a useful way to start reading real material with fluency. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vientito Senior Member Canada Joined 6367 days ago 212 posts - 281 votes | Message 52 of 58 14 March 2012 at 1:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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중점 ... the second one is 㸃 meaning point. ex 점심 same word we used in Chinese but means slightly different thing. In fact, the hanja for 중점 is an entirely different word from the example you quote. It comes from 重 which means heavy (verified via naver). The other examples you quoted has the origin of 中, which means centre or middle. These two chinese words have entirely different meaning and they do sound close however. For the purpose of memorization you probably care less about its origin. Your technique is probably the most optimal approach in tackling the difficulty of finding mnemonics, without any background in chinese. You will get to understand the importance of all these hanguls after you read through thousands of articles. Sooner or later you should be able to connect the dots.
p.s. I'd like to post a couple snapshots I've taken on my trip to Korea but they are on my local storage so I have no idea how to embed them on this post 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6227 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 53 of 58 14 March 2012 at 3:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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The Handbook of Korean Vocabulary, by Miho Choo & William O'Grady can help those with no knowledge of Chinese to identify and understand the roots that form Korean words. Each entry provides the root, the Chinese character if there is one, and the colloquial meaning of that syllable, followed by a list of words that use it.
I bought this book a long time ago, when I was a beginner, and did not find it very useful as my vocab was small and I was not yet seeing the connections among words. Once my vocab grew to the point that I started noticing the connections myself, that's when the book became useful. It is actually quite enjoyable to browse through the book and read the lists of related vocab. I don't try to memorize word lists, but it does sort of open me up to understanding the words later, when I encounter them. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4721 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 54 of 58 15 March 2012 at 12:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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This is like the argument that knowing Latin helps one understand English words better. I studied Latin for a few
years and found that even though I recognized the Latin roots of many words, I do not think knowing the Latin roots helped me to understand English better in any significant way. It is the same with Greek root words. Although I recognize a few roots in English it does not really help me to understand the meaning of new words. I can recognize that roots are roots without needing to know whether the roots are Latin, Greek or something else. How? Because roots appear frequently in words that have similar meaning so just purely from that I can work out the meaning of words that have similar roots to words I already know. For example, "seong" means "star" in Chinese. Just by knowing that "seong" means "star", I can work out that "Nakseongdae" means something to do with stars. All I needed to know was that "seong" means star and you can learn that by looking up the dictionary or being told that by someone and there is no need to know whether the root is Chinese, Latin or whatever ... Neither do you need to know the Chinese character for "seong". It is the same for word roots that are of Korean origin. In other words, it is enough to know that a word (written in Hangeul) is a root word. You do not need to know the Hanja for the root or need to know the root has a Chinese origin. The root could be of Manchurian, Mongolian or any other origin - all you need to know is that word is a root word. The same could be said of Konglish words. You don't need to know English to know that "computer" (in Hangeul) is a word meaning "computer" in English. You just need to know the word means "computer" and that any compound word containing "computer" means something pertaining to computers. You do not need to know the correct spelling of "computer" in English to recognize "computer" (in Hangeul) as a (root) word and the meaning of that word. Many words that appear in Konglish actually have a non-English origin like "klaxon". Many Koreans assume these words have an English origin. This mistaken notion does not prevent them from understanding the meaning of these words. Knowing that the words are actually of French or other non-English origin does not improve the efficiency of learning these words for the average Korean speaker IMO. And knowing how to spell "klaxon" in Latin characters does not really enhance the learning of this word in Korean. On the other hand, if you have already studied Chinese, of course it is much easier to learn the meaning of many Korean words. However, to say that learning Chinese really helps you to learn Korean and therefore it is recommended for you to learn Hanja is like saying it's helpful to learn Latin in order to learn English better or speed up the learning or make it easier to learn new words or something. As I have said, learning Latin is not really worth it if that is the aim of learning that language. The pay-off is simply not large enough to make it worthwhile. Similarly, I would never recommend anyone to learn Greek in order to use it as a learning aid in learning English ... and the characters used in Greek are much easier to learn than learning Chinese characters IMO (and the overall process of learning to read Greek much easier than learning Chinese in my view). The time you spend learning Hanja may be more profitably spent on learning more Korean words in my opinion if learning Korean is your aim. And once again, you can learn Korean words using the root system without knowing any Hanja. Edited by Balliballi on 15 March 2012 at 1:13am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4707 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 55 of 58 15 March 2012 at 9:09am | IP Logged | |||||
Completely agree, and it would be weird to suggest to learn Mandarin first. But here you tell people not to study Hanja because it would be the same as studying Latin. This is of course wrong. Hanja are roots (for Korean), while Latin is a full language which clearly is several orders of magnitude more difficult and longer to do. You can easily find root dictionaries for English (which don't teach the declensions and grammar of Latin), and that's what Hanja work as. And as opposed to roots like "tele", "techno", "poly" which have 1 meaning, just knowing that 성 means "star" is clearly missing the whole thing (with all due respect, I know you're much better at Korean than I am), because that's not what it means in 성별 for instance (though "별" would also mean "star"?). For that example (but it's more the rule than the exception) 성 can mean "family name", "sex", "accomplish", "look carefully", "town", "star", "flourishing", "saint/sacred", "sincere", limiting my list to the ones I've learnt until now (up to 5th year of hanja schooling, or a bit under 700). Yesterday I've learnt 유리, or rather some of its meanings. What does 유 mean? What does 리 mean? Well, my dictionary gives the following hanja for 유리: 有利, 有理, 流離, 琉璃, 遊離, 瑠璃, meaning things as diverse as profit, isolation and glass. And this is not a contrived example I would choose everytime, I see this about everyday when learning vocabulary.
I disagree. The knowledge of hanja helps remembering vocabulary so much more easily that it completely outweighs the time spent on them. But I guess there's no true answer to this. If you find it annoying to learn them, then simply don't learn them. But if some people reading this find it interesting or funny (for me it is..) or want to read some material in mixed script, then I don't see why you would tell them not to. It's just wrong to say it's the same as learning another language first. The fact that univerisyt entrance has some hanja examination in Korea but no Latin examination in English-speaking countries may be a sign of the difference. Edit: I realise the topic of this thread is about knowing if the difficulty of Korean is overrated or not. My post was certainly not implying that Korean is difficult because you would need to learn hanja. I was merely reacting to people advicing against learning them. It's all a matter of personal preference of course. Edited by vermillon on 15 March 2012 at 9:37am 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4721 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 56 of 58 25 March 2012 at 6:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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I didn't say you shouldn't learn it, I said it's not necessary to learn Hanja for learning Korean (except if you are studying Korean in order to study academics in Korean etc, that is, you are at an advanced level and want to go to the highest level). There is a difference between those two statements though it is small. I am referring to people in my post who are in the process of learning Korean, and they are not at native-speaker level in speaking, writing and reading. As for your comment, it confirmed what I just said and you also reiterated what you said in your earlier post above, which is that you can learn the ROOTS of words in the Korean language without knowing how to write them. It just happens that the majority of the roots in Korean are of Chinese origin, that is, Hanja. So when you say you are learning roots and therefore learning Hanja, the learning of the Hanja is coincidental (because of the above fact).
When you say you are learning Hanja, you are actually learning the roots of Korean words, and I said in the post you refer to that learning roots is helpful in learning the Korean language (and for learning most languages in fact I would say). You can find that "유" has those different meanings without knowing the different Hanja words, including by sight, just by looking up that word in the dictionary. Actually, you know Korean far better than I do. "Seong" was just an example I picked out of thin air, and it is a poor example because, as you pointed out, it has different meanings in Hanja. You may have gone a step further than most people in learning sight-recognition of the Hanja words that comprise the root words you have learned, and doing this will help you if the Hanja words are provided in the reading material along with the relevant Korean words or if they appear as separate words themselves. But seeing Hanja in written material even for disambiguation purposes is something that occurs with much less frequency than before as I've shown by the examples of the newspapers above (and you can check this out easily yourself), and with the rate of its frequency in most everyday contemporary communications, you may be wasting your time learning Hanja if that is your purpose of learning Hanja and you wish to maximize your learning efficiency.
I seriously doubt that. (And you make a good point by the way that I should be comparing learning the root words in Latin with the root words in Hanja instead of comparing learning whole languages, but still, it would be much easier to learn the root words in Greek and in Latin because the root words are written in the Latin alphabet for the Latin root words and the Greek alphabet system for the Greek root words (the Greek alphabet is very similar to the Latin alphabet system). Compare learning "poly" and "tele" or their equivalents written in the Greek alphabet with learning 有利, 有理, 流離, 琉璃, 遊離.) But since I haven't studied Hanja I am not sure. I don't disagree that learning roots will help one to remember vocabulary so much more easily but the roots don't have to be written in Hanja for you to learn the roots (I repeat this once again to hammer this point home). I think people are mixing up "roots" and "Hanja" in this dicussion. It's enough to learn the roots (written in any language that you are comfortable with; mine is English so I would learn the root word "seong" is family name", "sex", "accomplish", "look carefully", "town", "star", "flourishing", "saint/sacred" and "sincere" in English) without knowing the Hanja form of them. As for the difficulty of learning Korean, I still think it's a difficult language to learn especially for people whose native language is English or a similar language, but as time goes on, I have found the speaking not as hard as I initially thought it was. Edited by Balliballi on 27 March 2012 at 4:34am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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