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.

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.

Last edited by Thora (2009 April 07, 4:44 am)

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war going on in the rest of the world thanks to having a long period of peace so their weapons and related tech were out of date, but in terms of education, living standards, urbanization, luxuries, domestic economy, etc they were still near the top of the heap despite still being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.

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2009 April 07, 5:31 am)

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.

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.

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.

Last edited by Tobberoth (2009 April 07, 2:36 pm)

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.

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 >_<