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Some questions on how Korean uses Chinese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Huliganov Octoglot Senior Member Poland huliganov.tvRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5356 days ago 91 posts - 304 votes  Speaks: English*, Polish, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Esperanto, Czech Studies: Romanian, Turkish, Mandarin, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 1 of 28 14 August 2010 at 11:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I have if I may a few questions on how Korean uses Chinese. I am not intending to learn much Korean per se, but am interested to get a picture of how much mileage you could get in Korea with a knowledge of Chinese signs.
1. What percentage of the population in South and North Korea have been educated to read and write Chinese characters? 2. What is the size of the "canon" of characters they learn? I heard conflicting accounts from 1500 to 1800. 3. Does that mean they learn some Chinese with the signs, or just learn how to replace certain words from Hangul to Chinese signs? 4. Is it one sign, one reading, as in Mandarin, or is it that, as in Japanese, there are Sino-Korean readings and domestic readings which share the same sign? 5. Is it true that in the North the reading of some Chinese characters varies from thath given in South Korea? Does that mean in some cases the meaning ascribed in Korean vary from the Chinese meanings quite a bit? 6. What amount of prominence to the Chinese signs have in public life? Shop signs? street signs? billboard advertising? menues in restaurants? 7. Can a European person knowing no Korean use a notebook and Chinese signs to make himself understood there among Korean people who don't speak European languages? 8. Is there a web resource that I can go to that lists the canon of Korean used Chinese characters and their readings, meanings and frequencies? 9. What is the degree of loaning from Chinese to Korean, and are the loans more similar to Mandarin in Korean or in Japanese? Many thanks in advance, if anyone can help with these. Edited by Huliganov on 14 August 2010 at 11:50am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ericspinelli Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5784 days ago 249 posts - 493 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Italian | Message 2 of 28 14 August 2010 at 6:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm sure there are people here more qualified to answer than myself, but here is my
take on things as somebody who is a beginner in Korean, has traveled a few times to South Korea, and is proficient in Japanese (i.e., knows a lot of Chinese characters). 1) I don't know. However, some of my Korean friends have said "I studied them but I don't really remember much" and tend to agree that kanji is the hardest part of studying Japanese. 2) I don't know, but I've always heard 1800. 3) I assume they learn hanja as used in [old] Korean. By all accounts, English is much more widely studied than either Chinese or Japanese. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if a bit of classical Korean/Chinese - adapted of course - were studied during higher education. 4) Like Japanese, hanja have multiple readings. 5) I don't know. 6) The only place I can recall consistently seeing hanja is station names, which are (at least in Seoul and Busan) written in hangul, hanja, and the Roman alphabet. 7) With the exception of a few very simple ideas for which the actual Korean could just as easily be memorized on the plane ride over, I doubt it. I'd wager you're more likely to meet somebody who can actual speak some Chinese or Japanese - in which case you might as well just communicate using that - than somebody who speaks only Korean but understands characters well enough to successfully communicate. 8) I don't know. If there are, however, I would imagine they are in Korean only. 9) The consensus seems to be between 60-70%, and certainly above 50%. Because Korean is much more phonetically rich than Japanese, I would imagine Korean pronunciation of characters is closer, in general, to the original. I don't think Mandarin has much if anything to do with Korean. My guess is that Korean, like Japanese, borrowed from a variety of Chinese dialects all of which predate Mandarin. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5536 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 3 of 28 14 August 2010 at 11:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'll try to help with the questions I can, but someone actually living in Korea (or a native speaker) could better answer many of these questions.
1800 Hanja characters are taught in school (900 in middle school; 900 in high school), but there was a thread here that brought up the topic of how much they actually remember, and the numbers were much lower (more like 100-200 for most people) since Hanja isn't used as heavily as it once was.
Korean words derived from Chinese are known as Sino-Korean words, which, as far as I've seen, is nearly always the "reading" for the appropriate Hanja character. For example, the noun "love" in Korean can be either "사랑 (sarang)" (native Korean) or "애 (ae)" (Sino-Korean). The latter is the Korean reading for the character 愛. Most Hanja have one reading, but there are exceptions. I don't recall seeing any readings that weren't Sino-Korean words, though.
From what I've read, heard, and seen from various Korean TV: Street signs and subway signs use Hanja, newspapers sometimes include Hanja (often for clarifying homonyms), and some TV shows will show a Hanja character on screen here and there (but not often). Nearly all TV programming, billboards, menus, shop signs, etc. that I've seen have been in either Hangul or English, though. Edited by Warp3 on 16 August 2010 at 6:14pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ichiro Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6210 days ago 111 posts - 152 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, French Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Malay | Message 4 of 28 15 August 2010 at 5:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As per the previous two contributors, someone will come along much better placed to answer than me. But for what it's worth -
My wife tells me that old people usually have good Hanja knowledge because they went through Japanese-style schooling. However, when she was working in Korea as a Japanese-language teacher, her pupils would frequently come to her and ask her to tell them how to spell _their_own_names_ in Hanja. They were interested, but didn't know how to do it! Hanja are simply unused for modern everyday communication. I and, more usefully, my wife, who is Korean, looked extensively on the Net for a comprehensive list of Hanja and readings, without much luck. We couldn't find anything very much even in Korean. I'm not sure why this should be - the net is lousy with lists of Joyo Kanji to help out Japanese students, but we could only find partial lists for Hanja scattered across different sites. It's another indicator to how important they are to Korean life. One thing is, it might be possible to back-engineer a list out of the open source character dictionary at the following location, which I don't remember finding when I looked around last year - http://openokpyon.com/hanja/ That being by the way, at the time, I had developed myself a very unsatisfactory list by bringing some of this material together, when Lo and behold, I was sent to Korea for work and got to go bookshopping. And as you might expect, there are books to support Korean people taking Hanja tests, both the 1,800 or so taught in school and beyond. I bought a fantastic volume called 한자 능력 시험 끝내기. This lists out 3,500 hanja including their readings, graded from 8 - 1 according the level of some local Korean 漢字能力試験 in which they appear. There are 50 characters at level 8, another 100 at level 7, and so on upwards. Level 3 takes you to 1,817 characters, which is the only total not ending in a round number of 50 or 100 and I guess the full set taught in normal secondary education, although elsewhere I've always seen this quoted as being 1,800 characters. The book lists the characters with a Sino-korean reading and a meaning. The Sino-korean reading is the equivalent to the Japanese on-yomi, but I think the meaning is defined by the book's editors to explain what the character is about, there's no such thing as a kun-yomi for Korean characters. Other lists might explain what a character means with a different word choice. Note that only a tiny minority of characters are listed with multiple Sino-korean readings - I think many fewer than have multiple readings in Chinese. Anyway, as I now had a super resource that I wanted to turn into study lists I spent a fun week typing up the contents of the book into a big spreadsheet. And because I am superly fantastic and great, I have now posted it on the internet for you, if you wish it. You should be able to download it from the following site - http://www.sendspace.com/file/3y4mey http://www.sendspace.com/file/3y4mey The list includes the character, the Sino-korean reading, a Korean word telling you what the character means, and the Kanji Knowledge test grade at which it first appears. Grades 4 and 3 are split into two groups identified in the list as 4.5 and 4, and 3.5. and 3. The .5 grades come first. A word of caution - I typed the list in and cross-checked it myself. But I know there are still errors in it, not least because there are supposed to be 1,817 on the list and there's only 1,814. I've lost 3 from the second half of grade 3. But I hope you'll still find it useful. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5536 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 5 of 28 15 August 2010 at 6:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It isn't a web resource, but the book "A Guide To Korean Characters" (which I've been using for my own Hanja studies) does have the "school taught 1800" Hanja in it (primarily sorted by stroke count, but there are indices in the back for other methods).
Also, since one of the indices is the "900 middle school Hanja in textbook order" it reminded me that I was mistaken on one point I made above. The 1800 Hanja are taught in middle and high school (900 in each), not in elementary school. BTW, thanks for linking that document Ichiro. I'm definitely interesting in checking that out. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ericspinelli Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5784 days ago 249 posts - 493 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Italian | Message 6 of 28 15 August 2010 at 7:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Hanja dictionaries list both readings for 愛. The same is true for a number of characters, at last all the ones I looked up (犬, 水, 氷, 用, 情). It seems they are used in a similar fashion to Japanese, which is not surprising. I would imagine most languages that borrowed Chinese characters but have no linguistic relation to the Chinese language have (or had) similar issues. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Jiwon Triglot Moderator Korea, South Joined 6437 days ago 1417 posts - 1500 votes Speaks: EnglishC2, Korean*, GermanC1 Studies: Hindi, Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 28 15 August 2010 at 1:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It's been ages since I visited this forum.. it's nice to come back on a Korean thread.. :)
1. What percentage of the population in South and North Korea have been educated to read and write Chinese characters? - Well, can't say for North Korea, but EVERYONE in South Korea with primary education will know some Chinese characters. 2. What is the size of the "canon" of characters they learn? I heard conflicting accounts from 1500 to 1800. - They do learn 1800, but not many retain all of them. 3. Does that mean they learn some Chinese with the signs, or just learn how to replace certain words from Hangul to Chinese signs? - I don't know what exactly you are trying to get at here. They learn the form(shape) of the characters, its meaning in Korean and its sound in Korean. 4. Is it one sign, one reading, as in Mandarin, or is it that, as in Japanese, there are Sino-Korean readings and domestic readings which share the same sign? - All characters usually have one reading, except very few that have two sounds, but you get that in Mandarin too. 5. Is it true that in the North the reading of some Chinese characters varies from thath given in South Korea? Does that mean in some cases the meaning ascribed in Korean vary from the Chinese meanings quite a bit? - Don't know about the first question. I'm not sure what you are trying to ask in the second question. But I should say not all characters are used in the same way as they are Mandarin Chinese as Korean and Mandarin have very different grammatical structures. 6. What amount of prominence to the Chinese signs have in public life? Shop signs? street signs? billboard advertising? menues in restaurants? - You get Hanja along with Hangul for some street signs and subway stations, but usage of Hanja in everyday life is nearly non-existent. 7. Can a European person knowing no Korean use a notebook and Chinese signs to make himself understood there among Korean people who don't speak European languages? - I don't think so. Besides, even if the Korean person you meet knows a lot of Hanja, the sheer difference in grammar would hinder communication greatly. 8. Is there a web resource that I can go to that lists the canon of Korean used Chinese characters and their readings, meanings and frequencies? - No idea. 9. What is the degree of loaning from Chinese to Korean, and are the loans more similar to Mandarin in Korean or in Japanese? - you get this everywhere in Korean language. Chinese characters act like Latin and Greek word roots on which English is built on, in my opinion. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| luhmann Senior Member Brazil Joined 5334 days ago 156 posts - 271 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: Mandarin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic (classical) | Message 8 of 28 15 August 2010 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Regarding question 5, Wikipedia says that "Officially, hanja has not been used in North Korea since June 1949 (...), because Kim Il-sung considered it an artifact of Japanese occupation and an impediment to literacy."
1 person has voted this message useful |
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