fwiw - Not sure what you mean by 'modern times', but when I was at uni in Japan about half the foreign students in my program were Korean. They all knew Chinese characters. (Would it be necessary in order to read older stuff?)

Practicality aside, Hangul has always struck me as beautiful (kind of ancient hieroglyph meets modern minimalism.) The hanja/hangul mix just seems like an aesthetic blunder imo. =]

Good luck to the OP! (pls excuse the brief digression)

Koreans studies of Hanja are definitely limited but at least they study them. Compared to us westerners, they have a HUGE advantage in that area if they actually decide to seize the opportunity. The Koreans in my class did not so I usually got better scores on kanji tests... but that's because I studied hard, they were just playing around.

As for Hangul... it has its good parts and bad parts. It's an impressive writing system but it's grossly overrated by Koreans who seem to think it's the ultimate way of writing, regardless of how convoluted it can get.

The Koreans I've asked said that they learned less than 1000 characters starting in highschool, and not to a very high standard. I'd equate it to how highschool students here stumble through Old English for a few weeks and then never bother with it again. I've never encountered any Korean students in a high-level Japanese class (I mostly had Chinese classmates), so anecdotally I can't say it's a big advantage for them.

In any case I think our encounters are a bit different. You were encountering Korean students who were learning Japanese, a Sino-character-using language, whereas Koreans I'm encountering here are learning English, so they don't have any extra Sino exposure/interest. From what I recall from previous threads you have a few years on me, so the students you encountered when you were at uni are likely of a different generation than the ones I meet now. Hanja use is in steady decline in Korea and afaik is almost nonexistent in normal life post-1980s (most Koreans I meet here are born in the 90s).

The ability to read older stuff generally isn't really treated as important. Japanese people can't read stuff written pre-WWII or early post-WWII until they study 文語 in highschool (and many people seem to struggle with it from what I hear). Unless one is a big classical literature otaku (and in their late 50s probably), they read modern adaptations. Typical Vietnamese people can't read any old texts, but their writing system was forced to Latin characters much further back in history. Mainland Chinese can't read old texts (or texts from Taiwan & HongKong) until they learn traditional characters (I'm assuming this also happens in highschool). They typically read simplified character adaptations. A typical western highschooler finds Shakespeare very difficult to read, despite it being classed as modern English. Hell, when I went to the US for middle school, my classmates had trouble reading any English.

Surprisingly it seems that North Korea has been more liberal-minded, not being afraid to effect reforms in order to make hangul fit modern Korean pronunciation better.

Quote:There was a minor and unsuccessful movement in the early twentieth century to abolish syllabic blocks and write the jamo individually and in a row, in the fashion of the Western alphabets: e.g. ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ for 한글 hangeul.

eww eww eww

Interesting - thanks. It seems a shame that so much becomes unreadable in just a few decades. Considering that kanji literacy was low until ... just before the turn of the century(?), the amount of change since then is quite astonishing.

An example of the opposite is Icelandic (my heritage). Its written language hasn't changed in something like 1000 years, so Icelanders are apparently able to read medieval Old Icelandic and Old Norse.

I'm impressed by all the folks here who are learning more than one Asian language. what a challenge.

Thora Wrote:An example of the opposite is Icelandic (my heritage). Its written language hasn't changed in something like 1000 years, so Icelanders are apparently able to read medieval Old Icelandic and Old Norse.

Yeah, Icelandic is crazy. No one else in Scandinavia can understand them, even though we know it's more or less just like that we spoke here a thousand years ago.

World-wide (including Europe/the west), general literacy had been pretty low until only maybe the early to mid 1800s. Japan actually had one of the highest rates of literacy (in two languages at that) in the world during the Edo period (85% for males according to the first google hit).

Japan wasn't as far behind the world during the end of 鎖国 as it is generally made out to be. They missed out on all of the war going on in the rest of the world thanks to having a long period of peace so their weapons and related tech were out of date, but in terms of education, living standards, urbanization, luxuries, domestic economy, etc they were still near the top of the heap despite still being technically feudal (the rank and file samurai were at that point worse off financially than merchants & the more successful farmers). This is probably why Japan was the only East-Asian country not colonized or otherwise exploited long-term. They were essentially just a political reform away from being first-world already.

If you want to talk about hanzi literacy, then I believe it was rather low at the same time period, but China had long been in a state of decline before the colonizers even showed up. Literacy there never increased until economic conditions improved after WW2. Korea was in an even worse-off condition until the Japanese invasion thanks to despotic rulers who feared intellectuals and banned commerce.

Yay for thread hijacking.

Before, I had the impression that hangul was fonetic. Are you sure about that? In what ways hangul is not fonetic?

mentat_kgs Wrote:Before, I had the impression that hangul was fonetic. Are you sure about that? In what ways hangul is not fonetic?

Depends on what you mean by fonetic, but yes, Hangul is a phonemic alphabet, each symbol stands for one sound. It's organized into syllabic blocks though but that doesn't change that it's an alphabet.

Tobberoth Wrote:

mentat_kgs Wrote:Before, I had the impression that hangul was fonetic. Are you sure about that? In what ways hangul is not fonetic?

Depends on what you mean by fonetic, but yes, Hangul is a phonemic alphabet, each symbol stands for one sound. It's organized into syllabic blocks though but that doesn't change that it's an alphabet.

It's not phonetic..
ㅂ is p or b depending on position
ㄷ is t or d depending on position
ㅈ is ch or j depending on position
ㄹ is r or l depending on position
ㅇ is ng or silent depending on position
ㅍ is pronounced as ㅂ depending on position
ㅌ,ㅅ,ㅆ,ㅈ, and ㅊ are pronounced as ㄷ depending on position
ㅋ and ㄲ are pronounced as ㄱ depending on position
ㅂ and ㅍ are pronounced as ㅁ depending on context
ㄷ,ㅌ,ㅅ,ㅆ,ㅈ,ㅊ, and ㅎ are pronounced as ㄴ depending on context
ㄱ,ㅋ, andㄲ are pronounced as ㅇ depending on context
ㄴ is pronounced as ㄹ depending on context, but isn't regular
.. plus about twice this many I don't feel like inputting anymore, plus a number of other rules that aren't element dependent, like resyllabification. (ex: 한글은 is pronounced 한그른). In other words, reading Korean sucks compared to Japanese or Chinese.

Jarvik7 Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:

mentat_kgs Wrote:Before, I had the impression that hangul was fonetic. Are you sure about that? In what ways hangul is not fonetic?

Depends on what you mean by fonetic, but yes, Hangul is a phonemic alphabet, each symbol stands for one sound. It's organized into syllabic blocks though but that doesn't change that it's an alphabet.

It's not phonetic..
ㅂ is p or b depending on position
ㄷ is t or d depending on position
ㅈ is ch or j depending on position
ㄹ is r or l depending on position
ㅇ is ng or silent depending on position
ㅍ is pronounced as ㅂ depending on position
ㅌ,ㅅ,ㅆ,ㅈ, and ㅊ are pronounced as ㄷ depending on position
ㅋ and ㄲ are pronounced as ㄱ depending on position
ㅂ and ㅍ are pronounced as ㅁ depending on context
ㄷ,ㅌ,ㅅ,ㅆ,ㅈ,ㅊ, and ㅎ are pronounced as ㄴ depending on context
ㄱ,ㅋ, andㄲ are pronounced as ㅇ depending on context
ㄴ is pronounced as ㄹ depending on context, but isn't regular
.. plus about twice this many I don't feel like inputting anymore, plus a number of other rules that aren't element dependent, like resyllabification. (ex: 한글은 is pronounced 한그른). In other words, reading Korean sucks compared to Japanese or Chinese.

That doesn't mean it isn't phonetic. English is phonetic yet e is pronounced differently in pet and they.

Tobberoth Wrote:That doesn't mean it isn't phonetic. English is phonetic yet e is pronounced differently in pet and they.

Yeah, actually, it does.

http://www.englishclub.com/esl-articles/200104.htm

wccrawford Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:That doesn't mean it isn't phonetic. English is phonetic yet e is pronounced differently in pet and they.

Yeah, actually, it does.

http://www.englishclub.com/esl-articles/200104.htm

Hmm, seems that's right... well, regardless, Hangul is considered a phonemic orthography. You know how a word is pronounced by looking at it, even though each symbol might not always be pronounced the same way. A written Hangul word can only be pronounced one way. Granted, it's not as nice as Japanese kana which can only be read one way and only be written one way and you don't have to know which characters come before or after. (Well, you kinda need that in Japanese in some cases... but overall).

EDIT: Actually, it seems that Hangul is morpho-phonemic, though it used to be purely phonemic. For those who don't know, this means that sounds which should have different symbols because they are pronounced differently share symbols because historically, it was the same kind of structure. The example from English is cats and dogs. In a pure phonemic writing system, it should be cats and dogz, but since the s is the same genitive structure, it is written with one symbol.

Tks for the clarification, Jarvik.
In a rank of how phonetic hangul is, would you put it before or behind English? What about spanish?

It all started when I mistakenly said that Chinese was similar to Japanese......

Anyway, thanks for the responses! I think it is kind of neat that there are other military people who share the same interest in kanji as I do.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Tks for the clarification, Jarvik.
In a rank of how phonetic hangul is, would you put it before or behind English? What about spanish?

It's not anywhere near as bad as English. I've never heard of there being spelling bees for natives of hangul for example

One big advantage for English learners though is the quality & quantity of learning material. Most Korean stuff I've seen is pretty awful. I've never studied Spanish so I have no idea about its writing system. French is supposedly the worst writing system after English though.

Jarvik7 Wrote:

mentat_kgs Wrote:Tks for the clarification, Jarvik.
In a rank of how phonetic hangul is, would you put it before or behind English? What about spanish?

It's not anywhere near as bad as English. I've never heard of there being spelling bees for natives of hangul for example

One big advantage for English learners though is the quality & quantity of learning material. Most Korean stuff I've seen is pretty awful. I've never studied Spanish so I have no idea about its writing system. French is supposedly the worst writing system after English though.

If you're talking about resources for learning Korean, you're amazingly right. I looked everywhere for decent resources and KoreanClass101.com was the only good one I could find... so I tried to look for Japanese resources for learning Korean and it was even worse >_<