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Korean - basic questions | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7377 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes  12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 49 26 January 2005 at 5:52am | IP Logged |
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Ardaschir:
Thank you for your answers! I have read all your posts and have a few more questions about the Korean language before I can update the review: 1) How many Hanjas do you need to read a popular newspapers? 2) How many Hanjas are there in the dictionary? 3) Can you browse the web using only Hangul? 4) Being a polyglot you have a unique perspective on this: How beautiful is the Korean language? Would you say there is an aestethic pleasure in learning it? 5) I am concerned that a prospective student of Korean might get depressed at reading how hard it really is to learn the language. Could we break down, arbitrarily, the target level in two, Intermediate and Advanced, then give some idea of the difficulty of reaching Intermediate fluency and what you can do with it. For Advanced I think it's pretty clear. But I fear any person that would read our forum would be discouraged and never even start, thinking that it's well-nigh impossible to learn the language at an advanced level, that you will never learn to read newspapers and that nobody in Korea will ever talk to you! I know this is an exageration, but if we could provide for some way of describing the language difficulty in a tiered manner I think this would help overcome the fear. 6) Is there any utility in learning Korean - at all? Is there anything you can do if you speak Korean, in Korea, reading, doing business with Koreans abroad, that you could not do if you only spoke English? Is it worth at all to study this language? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7257 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 10 of 49 26 January 2005 at 7:51pm | IP Logged |
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1) How many Hanjas do you need to read a popular newspapers?
As I stated before, 1800 Hanjas are in general use throughout Korean society, but there is certainly a smaller most common contingent, and I believe I have often encountered statements that one could begin reading a newspaper when one knew about half that amount, so perhaps roughly 900. 2) How many Hanjas are there in the dictionary? That depends entirely on the size and quality of the dictionary. Also, there are two types of dictionaries: In Korean-Korean or Korean-foreign language dictionaries the Korean headwords are all given in Hangul, but those 70% that are derived from Hanja have these characters immediately following in brackets. In Hanja dictionaries (known as "oak-pyun") the individual Hanja comes first, followed by its basic meaning in Hangul, its pronuniation in Hangul, its meaning and pronunciation in Japanese, its meaning in English, its common abbreviated forms (if any), its common calligrahic forms, its stroke order, its etymology and variety of meanings, and then a list of words (Hanja first, Hangul second) in which it is a compound element. 3) Can you browse the web using only Hangul? Yes. Hanja has little or no place on the internet. 4) Being a polyglot you have a unique perspective on this: How beautiful is the Korean language? Would you say there is an aestethic pleasure in learning it? You are right, this is a question for a polyglot, particularly one who learns initially by the shadowing method. I have been deterred from studying certain languages because I disliked shadowing them because they were simply too ugly. I never had this problem with Korean. Official Korean newsbroadcasts are not pretty, but Korean singers are gaining enormous popularity throughout Asia. Korean does sound quite pretty to my ears when it is spoken relatively slowly, as by a soft female voice reciting a children's story or a deep male voice reciting Buddist chants. So yes, there is certainly an aesthetic pleasure in learning it, and this goes for the script too, particulary in its calligraphic form. 5) I am concerned that a prospective student of Korean might get depressed at reading how hard it really is to learn the language. Could we break down, arbitrarily, the target level in two, Intermediate and Advanced, then give some idea of the difficulty of reaching Intermediate fluency and what you can do with it. For Advanced I think it's pretty clear. But I fear any person that would read our forum would be discouraged and never even start, thinking that it's well-nigh impossible to learn the language at an advanced level, that you will never learn to read newspapers and that nobody in Korea will ever talk to you! I know this is an exageration, but if we could provide for some way of describing the language difficulty in a tiered manner I think this would help overcome the fear. I understand your concern, but I am more concerned about the opposite and currently existing fairly widespread false notion that Korean is relatively easy to learn. I imagine this is why many people give up when they find out it is actually hard. If they knew that it was hard to begin with, they would know what they were up against. At any rate, yes, I think it would be fair to describe the Korean language for Western learners as having a learning curve that is not particularly steep at the beginning, has a very long plateau phase at the intermediate stage, and an extreemly steep and long climb to the advanced stage. 6) Is there any utility in learning Korean - at all? Is there anything you can do if you speak Korean, in Korea, reading, doing business with Koreans abroad, that you could not do if you only spoke English? Is it worth at all to study this language? Knowing even just a smattering of Korean would certainly be of great utility for travelling about Korea as there are indeed still many Koreans who cannot communicate in English or any other foreign language. My subjective comments on frustration about not being able to immerse myself entirely should be taken with a grain of salt as coming from the language obsessed creature that I am. More normal people who simply want to communicate as easily as possible might actually find the Korean state of affairs to their liking. As for reading, although I stress the crucial importance of knowing Hanja, Hangul itself is indeed the easiest of East Asian scripts to read, and as I indicated before, popular works for younger people employ it exclusively, and if you walk into any bookstore you can find works of all kinds written it it, so there is a great deal of material that you can read in it, both original Korean works and translations from other languages, such as Chinese classics. Also, Koreans abroad are infinitely more receptive to foreigners speaking Korean than are Koreans in Korea so there is no problem at all getting them to speak their language to you. As to your final point as to whether it is worth it at all to study this language, I could answer on various levels. My earlier comments notwithstanding, I think that Koreans are certainly impressed by any attempt to learn their language and thus the effort will certainly win appreciation and good will. Moreover, one futurological claim that I am inclinded to believe is that Korea will become a global player in every respect in the coming decades, and if so, knowledge of the language will certainly be of great value. 15 persons have voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7257 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 11 of 49 27 January 2005 at 1:00am | IP Logged |
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P.S. I would like to add something so important to your 6th query about the value of learning Korean that I cannot believe I forgot to mention it until now. There is tremendous intellectual value, an incomparable experience of mental expansion, in truly learning a language that breaks down reality into such different categories than we do with our European tongues. There are so many concepts that have no equivalent and so defy translation, or which somehow express a given idea so much better than any Western word can do, that I not infrequently find myself wanting to fall back on a Korean word even when I am thinking in a Western language that I know much better. To date there are extremely few Korean loan words in Western languages, but if more and more of us learn it, I am sure that there will be a steady flow of lexical enrichment from this new source.
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| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7377 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 49 27 January 2005 at 10:36am | IP Logged |
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Dear Ardaschir,
Thank you so much for the reply - this is much clearer now. Please allow me to ask a few more questions so that I can write an informative and accurate profile of the Korean language for the use of prospective learners who visit this site (I only know Korean from the excellent movies produced in this country). 1) What is the total number of Hanjas that are used in the language. I understand that some only "live" in a few difficult novels or historical academic books. What I want is give an indication of the frequency distribution of these Hanjas, so that people could reach some simple conclusions such as "with 1800 Hanjas I can read any newspapers, but alreay with 1000 I can understand more than 80%, however I would need 5000 to be fully litterate". These statistics are readily available for English, Russian, French, and make for encouraging reading when learning new vocabulary. 2) Would I be correct in writing that "You can learn to read basic Korean texts and everything on the Internet in Korean much more easily that in Japanese or Chinese, thanks to the Korean alphabet. However, you should realize that contrary to popular belief, you need to know Chinese characters (Hanjas) to access more advanced texts and especially any newspaper. Thus, Korean is both a relatively easy Asian language insofar as you can read and understand it more easily than Japanese or Chinese, but it is definitely as difficult if you want to read and speak perfectly." 3) Would it be possible for you to list a few striking instances of concepts/words that exist in Korean and that you wish existed in English? Or words that denote a view of the world that is totally different from ours? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| manna Groupie Kyrgyzstan Joined 7259 days ago 94 posts - 112 votes | Message 13 of 49 28 January 2005 at 5:01pm | IP Logged |
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(1) The 1800 Hanjas are the ones that are mosre or less in everyday use. As mentioned by Ardaschir, there are many many more (I believe there are some 13000 Hanja in the computer fonts, and that's not exhaustive).
(2) I would say so. (3) what about kibun? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| randy310 Senior Member United States Joined 7066 days ago 117 posts - 117 votes Speaks: English* | Message 14 of 49 14 August 2005 at 1:13pm | IP Logged |
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Francois, Audio Forum has an FSI program in Korean in 2 volumes including 31 hours of audio and two 550 page texts.
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| czech Senior Member United States Joined 7195 days ago 395 posts - 378 votes Studies: English* | Message 15 of 49 14 August 2005 at 5:29pm | IP Logged |
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Ardaschir, I once thought about learning Korean, but never got anywhere with FSI, I didn't get past the first lesson because I decided to go back and continue improving Spanish. As far as good tapes and books, could you tell us what type of structure your lessons take? How much of the conjugation system is covered? Does it introduce writing and reading? Coming from a serious polyglot, I plan on trying it when I decide to learn it.
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| randy310 Senior Member United States Joined 7066 days ago 117 posts - 117 votes Speaks: English* | Message 16 of 49 14 August 2005 at 6:08pm | IP Logged |
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czech, FSI can be offputting at first as it does not inlude bright colors, drawings, games, and puzzles like some of the little mini feel good courses but if you persevere with it you will succeed. When I first started Spanish FSI after Pimsleur I thought it was impossible. But then I went back to it with a different attitude wich made the difference. Learning a language is like climbing a mountain, actually two mountains. You have the language to master and you have to master yourself. You have that inner mountain to climb each time you try something new.
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