All about Korean/Chinese

[maxiewawa]

I already started the all about Korean/Japanese post, here's a different take on Korean!

In a survivalphrases.com lesson, we learnt 이것 is 'this' and 저것 is 'that', if I remember correctly.

It just hit me like a bolt from the sky: 这个 and 那个！The other one I learned the other day was 모자 = 帽子！매일 = 每日! 'Tomorrow' also has 日／일 but I'm not sure what the first kanji/hanzi/hanja is.

I just thought I'd start a thread where difficult grammar points could be explained by 'oh, it's just like x in Chinese'.

I actually found a book here in Shanghai where the Hanja were shown along side the Hangul. It was really helpful since they sound so similar to standard Beijing readings of the Hanja. Maybe because Korea is so close to where the standard dialect of Chinese originated.

Do most people in Korea know the Hanja/Hanzi/kanji for various words?

One final tidbit: at one of China's big political gatherings, representatives of all the many minority groups were invited, and some groups were from such remote areas of China that they needed translators. One of these ethnic groups was from North East China, and spoke Korean! So I think Korean is one of the official recognised dialects of China.

[Keith]

Great idea. It can be really helpful to relate Korean with Chinese as well as Japanese, because in the end, we're all Chinese anyway. lol jkjk I joke I joke!

Anyway, a lot of Korean words come from Chinese, and Chinese characters. Typically, not a lot of Koreans know Chinese. Hanja (Chinese character) education used to be mandatory, but I think it is slowly being phased out of the education system. It's no longer mandatory, but I'm not sure if it's being phased out altogether.

But Koreans know Hanja, without knowing the characters. What I mean by that is this.

take the word 법 (beop) which means law. 불법 (bulbeop) means against law, anti-law - essentially it means illegal. that 불 (bul) in front of 불법 (bulbeop) means anti, against, or not. There's a corresponding hanja to that. I don't think a lot of Koreans know the actual Chinese character, but everyone knows what 불 (bul) means.

So essentially, the chinese language has its footprints all over Korean. Koreans may not know Chinese characters, but they all kind of know Chinese.. without really knowing it. (does that make sense?)

And Korean is actually one of the recognized dialects of China. The Yanbian (I think that's how it's spelled) province has Korean as its official language. A Korean can totally survive in that province without knowing Chinese at all

[hyunwoo]

Yeah, to add some explanation to what Keith has very well explained already, the people who are living in the Yanbian area are called 조선족, or 朝鲜族 in Chinese. They speak Korean as their mother tongue, and speak fluent Chinese of course, and they are a recognized 小数民族. They(조선족) generally have a very competitive edge when it comes to job positions that require both Korean and Chinese, but whether this will continue to be so in the future depends on how well Korean is kept among them and how well they are respected as an independant race inside the Chinese population.

[hyunwoo]

Yes, just like Keith said,

Korean people know 汉字(or Hanja) very well because more than half of all the characters derived from Chinese in the past and they can be re-written in Chinese characters, although many of the words are different in the way they are written because we don't use the simplified version.

Have a look at this :

(http://oldcine.co.kr/board1/upfiles/122330.JPG)

It's an extract from a Korean newspaper in the 70's. I am sorry I couldn't find a better example, but this picture is good enough to show you that there are Chinese characters written all over the page, here and there.


For example,

Korean people say "학생" for "student", and they ALL know that 학 means "to learn" and 생 means "a person", but most young people don't really know how to write "학생" in Chinese characters. But some young people and most older people can write it down like "學生" and what's more interesting is that almost everyone who's had some school education will 'recognize' this word to mean '학생' because they've all been exposed to this word here and there without really noticing it.

So basically speaking, my father doesn't speak any Chinese, but I am sure he won't have too much trouble ordering from a menu written in all Chinese in a restaurant in China, because he used to read the newspaper written 60% in Chinese characters.

interesting topic!!

[hyunwoo]

But for me, personally, I had to start from almost nothing when I decided to learn Japanese and Chinese because I was very lazy in learning Chinese characters in middle/highschool classes. T.T

We can't really talk about what words are similar between Chinese and Korean because there are sooooooooooooo many of them out there, (you can basically write 60% of a Korean sentence in Chinese characters, but we just DON'T. We recognize all the words as being Korean words as they are. ), but we can think about some interesting examples of similarities that still exist in pronunciations of some words between the two languages


For example,

고속도로 = 高速道路(gao su dao lu)

[steved]

I would think that most people know more charaters by sight than by being able to recall from memory. Some are easy to guess from the context. I was under the impression that high school graduates know about 2500 characters.

[steved]

I noticed that you used the simplified version of 漢. It doesn't even show up as a choice in the Korean IME. Are the simplified versions of the characters being used in Korea now?

[steved]

Maxiewawa,
I think what you are looking for is 來日 (to come).

[hyunwoo]

I was just writing that (汉字 instead of 漢字) in reply to Max's posting, so sorry for the confusion. We don't use any simplified Chinese characters in the Korean language

[hyunwoo]

Maxiewawa,
I think what you are looking for is 來日 (to come).

I agree !

[steved]

I was just writing that (汉字 instead of 漢字) in reply to Max's posting, so sorry for the confusion. We don't use any simplified Chinese characters in the Korean language

I took about a year of beginner Chinese in college and all they taught was the simplified versions so I had to relearn some but that wasn't too bad. Now I just have to try and remember them all over again. (My Chinese on the otherhand is completely gone .)

[steved]

So just for fun I have been trying to find the movie in the news clipping. "love forever..." or something like it starring Andrew l. Slone and Marie Costa but that is as far as I can get. imdb was no help.
Is that hangulization of Hollywood still current? 허리우드?

[Aline]

I think if there were hanja along with the new vocabulary, it would be easier for me to remember it.
Do anyone know good websites with hanjas?
Is it possible to post the hanjas for the words we learn in each lesson here?

[Keith]

hi aline

we do have the capability to get some hanja, along with the vocabulary in the pdf, but we don't do it simply because like we mentioned before, it's not mandatory even in Korea to know hanja.

Maybe some chinese speakers or (readers/writers) can help you out on this over here personally though, I can't offer much help in this area though sorry!

[steved]

If you have a good Korean-English dictionary it will show the Chinese characters associated with the word.