Korean terms and hangul

Shaderon

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Mbuzzy, you've just made me decide,.... I'm NOT learning conversational Korean.... they can go ******* lol That looks SO confusing!
 

MBuzzy

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Good choice, it is a crazy language. The alphabet is simple to read, but understanding the language is really hard.

When you get into conversational you have to deal with their weird word order (subject, object, verb), plus all of their identifiers, different words for the same thing but only in certain situations........Well, come to think of it, I guess its just as confusing as any other language!!!
 

MBuzzy

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Is the written Sino-Korean the same thing as Hanja?

Iceman - are you referring to the Hangul, pronunciation, or the characters themselves?

Koreans mostly use 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,etc....but I have also seen the Hanja characters (one horizontal line, two horizontal lines, etc) for the numbers.

The term Hanja actually gets a bit confusing in Korea, because it is the Korean word for Kanji....Personally, I get really mixed up how that works. To the best of my understanding, the two words are used completely interchangably, Kanji in China, Hanja in Korea.

It is also confusing to me how Koreans actually USE Hanja. In terms of numbers, I have only seen Hanja used in the older writings where the Chinese characters are being used for the whole thing. But in academic writings and even some newspapers, a basic knowledge of Hanja characters is necessary. I was told that the basic Korean high school student learns about 1,000 Hanja characters.
 

IcemanSK

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Iceman - are you referring to the Hangul, pronunciation, or the characters themselves?

Koreans mostly use 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,etc....but I have also seen the Hanja characters (one horizontal line, two horizontal lines, etc) for the numbers.

The term Hanja actually gets a bit confusing in Korea, because it is the Korean word for Kanji....Personally, I get really mixed up how that works. To the best of my understanding, the two words are used completely interchangably, Kanji in China, Hanja in Korea.

It is also confusing to me how Koreans actually USE Hanja. In terms of numbers, I have only seen Hanja used in the older writings where the Chinese characters are being used for the whole thing. But in academic writings and even some newspapers, a basic knowledge of Hanja characters is necessary. I was told that the basic Korean high school student learns about 1,000 Hanja characters.


I'm not exactly sure what I'm talking about, honestly. In a wikipedia article that I read had both Hangul (which I recognized as such) & Hanja (which I did not recognize). I'm glad I'm not the only one for whom this is confusing.
 

howard

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Hi,

The terms hanja and kanji both refer to Chinese characters. Hanja refers to the Korean use and pronunciation of Chinese characters. Kanji refers to the Japanese use and pronunciation of the same characters.

For example, have a look at these Chinese characters.

合氣道

Koreans would call these hanja, and pronounce them "hapkido". Japanese would call them kanji, and pronounce them "aikido".


Hope this helps...
 

IcemanSK

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Hi,

The terms hanja and kanji both refer to Chinese characters. Hanja refers to the Korean use and pronunciation of Chinese characters. Kanji refers to the Japanese use and pronunciation of the same characters.

For example, have a look at these Chinese characters.

合氣道

Koreans would call these hanja, and pronounce them "hapkido". Japanese would call them kanji, and pronounce them "aikido".


Hope this helps...

Yes sir, it does. Thank you.:asian:
 

MBuzzy

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Actually, believe it or not, Korean is easier than English. Less rules, less exceptions, the written language is phoenetic and syllable based....

You can learn to READ (just sound out the words) it easily, learning to speak it and understand it is another story. The word order is different, so it is harder for an adult's brain to make the switch.
 

hwarang_do_adam

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i better start learning japanease because im getting stationed there tommarow
 

MBuzzy

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Where will you be in Japan?

I know a lot of people who are either IN Japan or just came from there and not a single one of them spoke a word of Japanese. Although, I must say, I lived in Korea for a year and at least READING the language can be a big help. You can at least find familiar words then. Japanese is much more difficult than Korean to learn to read though....Good Luck!
 

terryl965

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Where will you be in Japan?

I know a lot of people who are either IN Japan or just came from there and not a single one of them spoke a word of Japanese. Although, I must say, I lived in Korea for a year and at least READING the language can be a big help. You can at least find familiar words then. Japanese is much more difficult than Korean to learn to read though....Good Luck!


I agree Japanese is such a complicated language.
 

tkd75

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I spent a year at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey learning Korean for the military. It is easy to learn to read, but as MBuzzy said, reading Korean and learning to speak and understand the language are two different things. As for the numbers, I still get confused with them. :hb: And I didn't learn any TKD terms or commands while at DLI. The most they said about TKD was "it's our national sport".

The zKorean site Kacey posted a link to used to have a section on numbers as well. I guess they took it down.
 

Drakanyst

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&#50676;
Here's the tricky part....In Korean, there is no r or l. It is the same letter, depending on where it falls in the word, it can sound different, but if you try to go somewhere in between the two, you will get it. It is tough to explain unless you read hangul, but if I used an L, then it sounds closer to an L......if I used an r, it sounds closer to a t than anything.....hard to explain.

this has to do with tongue placement! the consonant "ㄹ" is a guttural sound that is made in the back of the throat. so generally it is the halfway point between r and l.
 

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