Korean Job Discussion Forums

[blynch]

i can read some of them in japanese so it helps me out when i see written chinese and the elusive korean not written exclusively in hangul. do you guys learning korean bother to study them or is it just us poor saps studying japanese or chinese that spend 100s of hours of our lives learning to read them?

[Son Deureo!]

I learned a few hundred before I realized that they're used so infrequently in modern Korean that it's really not worth the effort to learn much more than I have. I've learned to recognize a lot of Korean Chinese character roots phonetically instead. Since the average Korean seems to forget most of their hanja after high school anyway, I found it harder and harder to justify the effort I was putting into hanju.

If I ever wanted to delve into more scholarly readings or ancient Sino-Korean literature I might change my mind.

If you've already learned a lot of Chinese characters through Chinese or Japanese, however, I have no doubt that you'll find that knowledge very handy as you learn Korean. If I ever decide to take up Mandarin or Japanese I'm sure I'll wish I'd studied my hanja a little harder, though.

Mithridates will probably come onto this thread soon and school me on the error of my ways.

[ekim]

I study Chinese, and though I've forgotten how to write most characters now, I can say language-wise, a sh$#-load of Korean words have Chinese roots, which makes it easy for me to remember. I dont' study Korean, but when I do bother learning a word, half the times it's just a little different from the Chinese pronounciation. It's like they took Chinese words, Japanese grammar, and made a language.

[gang ah jee]

My situation was pretty much the same as Son Deureo's - I found learning the first few hundred really helpful, but increasingly it felt like the investment of time wasn't worth it. However, I am now learning Japanese, and really regret not having learned more hanja.

I'd say that if you ever hope to achieve a high school level of literacy in Korean, or if you ever expect to learn Chinese or Japanese in the future, you most definitely should be learning hanja now.

[tzechuk]

I AM Chinese.. lol.. so I guess I should be able to read it?

[gang ah jee]

[Qinella]

[billybrobby]

[jg]

Someone who knows K and C please post some phrases, words, whatever in Chinese and then the similar looking/rooted Korean, with a translation? I'm not familiar with Korean at all but I am curious to see these similarities. The little Korean script I see doesn't ring any bells at all for me.

[Lizara]

I know about 600 hanja... which I learned more out of interest than anything, but at the same time I thought it would be useful to know the Korean readings and the meanings, and I was right... it makes learning Korean vocabulary SO much easier.

I don't know much Chinese or Japanese, but I know the numbers 1-10 in all three languages are somewhat similar... for example, four is "sa" in all three languages... and new is "shin". When my brother was studying Chinese we did a comparison and quite a lot of the words are similar to Korean, but I don't remember it well enough to confidently cite any more examples.

[Qinella]

[MissSeoul]

[gang ah jee]

[SPINOZA]

I'm not considered an authority on Chinese characters.

I can immediately identify 'water', 'China', 'door/gate' and 'mountain'.

'door' is my favorite because it actually looks like a door.

Most of them are a dog's breakfast to me, sadly, and I do not ever envisage studying them, unless my Korean gets so good that hanja study is necessary for precision, which is chiefly why they're still used in Korea I think, given that 수, for instance, can mean many things, right?

[gang ah jee]