Koreans rally for Chinese characters (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Koreans rally for Chinese characters
Tags: Chinese Characters \| Korean \| Mandarin
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12 messages over 2 pages: 1 2 Next >>

lichtrausch
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Message 1 of 12

31 March 2010 at 12:27am | IP Logged

Korean students rally for more Chinese character education:

http://www.chinasmack.com/pictures/koreans-seek-more-chinese -character-education-reactions/

I think I see a trend. As China becomes more successful, Chinese characters become more prestigious and desirable.
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jimbo
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Message 2 of 12

31 March 2010 at 12:38am | IP Logged

lichtrausch wrote:

I think I see a trend. As China becomes more successful, Chinese characters become more
prestigious and desirable.

Again.

Things are going back to normal.
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ennime
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Message 3 of 12

31 March 2010 at 12:47pm | IP Logged

I wonder though, if the current decline in use of chinese characters is that easily
reversible... basically there is an entire generation of Koreans who barely know any...
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Minlawc
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Message 4 of 12

31 March 2010 at 11:11pm | IP Logged

lichtrausch wrote:

I think I see a trend. As China becomes more successful, Chinese characters become more prestigious and desirable.

I doubt it has much to do with China's economic power, since Japan uses them and they're still ahead of China economically. I doubt they would adopt the simplified characters. From my understanding, and that's very little, there are a lot of historical and academic texts written with Chinese characters.

Since, from what I've heard, they still teach Chinese characters in school it'd be easy to reintroduce them.
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lichtrausch
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Message 5 of 12

01 April 2010 at 3:12am | IP Logged

Minlawc wrote:

I doubt it has much to do with China's economic power, since Japan uses them and they're still ahead of China economically.

It's more about potential economic power than current economic power. When children born tomorrow enter the workforce, China is most likely going to have similar economic strength as America...
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zhiguli
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Message 6 of 12

01 April 2010 at 3:50am | IP Logged

Looks more like wishful thinking to me.

From the comments:

Quote:

*sigh* Does no one want to point out the context of the photos? It’s not the Korean assembly singing praise to Chinese characters. A quick google turns out:

“They’re protesting against the possible removal of Chinese characters from KSAT in the upcoming revisement. The test makers are considering the complete removal of all subjects other than Korean, Mathematics and English and have colleges rely on school grades for the removed subjects in order to simplify the test, lessen the burden on Korean students, and make schools more relevant while putting a break on Korea’s overblown hakwon industry.”

Sounds like people who learned Chinese characters bitching about its removal from Korean university entrance exams => they wasted their time.

Even if they were demonstrating in favour of reviving hanja and closer ties with China, a few pictures of a couple dozen people do not a trend make.

Edited by zhiguli on 01 April 2010 at 3:51am
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chucknorrisman
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Message 7 of 12

01 April 2010 at 8:15am | IP Logged

I'd personally like to see even less use of hanja and some more native Korean words replacing Sino-Korean ones, but that's just a wishful thinking.
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qklilx
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Message 8 of 12

05 April 2010 at 10:33am | IP Logged

chucknorrisman, I'm not sure even your idea would happen since it's been a few hundred years since a lot of native Korean words were scrapped altogether for their sino-Korean counterparts. Unfortunately only 뫼 comes to my mind right now. I think reviving hanja would be easier than reviving native Korean words...

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