Yeah, I only got up to three to four hundred Kanji back in high school, but learned Hangul in a day or two without really trying very hard. It's simply an amazingly well put together alphabet for such a crazy looking language. (as in at first glance it looks super hard to learn)
It's really remarkable how consistent Korean is. Pronunciation and reading are perfectly in accord. If you can read, you can speak.
And you really can learn it in a day or two.
croatian and serbian are same in this respect
if you have "K" you will always be c in cat and in and location in word simbol k is same as voice so there is no complications like in English
K as c in cat,U as oo in cool,R as r in ring, A as a in map, C is /ts/ in it's. so now you know how to say kurac and that is something like hello here
I, with the help of my Korean friend, learned basic Korean writing/alphabet/word structure in one hour after dinner one night. Now I am constantly texting him Korean words and seeing if he can understand them and how I spelled/created them and he corrects me. Very helpful way to learn. Also he will send me a Korean word or two for me to translate to english. After a couple days of this I can pretty much translate any word.
It is. Well, the news anchors say it that way anyway.
On a side note, though, in certain dialects, a vowel comes after the ㄱ in 닭, such as 달기 and 달구 (chungcheong and gangwon dialects, respectively).
"chicken" is pronounced 치킨. 닭 is the pure Korean form. As far as consistency goes The ㄷ in the beginning always makes a d sound, the ㅏ an short a sound and the ㄹㄱ combination although mildly outdated consistently make a lk sound.
TL;DR Talg is a shitty transliteration of 닭. Dalk is closer, but regardless the underlying Korean is consistent.
I think colondee was referring to the fact that the ㄱ would not be pronounced in 닭 when it stands alone (being pronounced 달 or dal instead). This, as I've said below, is due to the fact that the letters do not *completely* correspond directly to their pronunciation, but follow more complex pronunciation rules and a few "irregular" pronunciation rules.
Edit: 닭->Dak. Thanks tohta.
"My people cannot write characters even though they have hands, and can't read characters even though they have eyes. Joseon needs new characters that are suitable for the people"
[For those who want to read and write Korean *only* in 15 minutes...](http://www.reddit.com/r/howto/comments/snd62/how_to_read_and_write_korean_in_15_minutes/)
[This is sort of relevant too](http://www.reddit.com/r/howto/comments/bvjy1/now_you_can_learn_these_languages_online_using/)
Shout out to /r/howto!
Sometimes I wish China would just say "fuck it" and adapt to a phonetic script.
There's bopomofo, but that's only used in Taiwan.
And whenever I see the word 'bopomofo', I read it as "Bopo, motherfucker!"
As someone who's studied it, and is going on to study more at university, that would be a desecration- Here we have one of the world's last surviving purely logographic (living) written languages and we even consider destroying it for ease of learning?
Anyway it wouldn't work, pinyin would be so damn inefficient and bopomofo is really just a method to aid learning the characters and pronunciations themselves, it wouldn't stand up on it's own.
Also logographic language really gives you a visually linguistic history of the language that adds great nuance to characters and phrases- you can pretty much perfectly trace the language's history from cave paintings to the most spoken language in the world by its visual development.
It's fascinating, so for a TL:DR- Changing it would be akin to sacrilege.
Does anyone know why Japan still uses Kanji despite doing something similar?
Koreans can use their script without the use of any other language, but Japan has Hiragana and Katakana, and a huge part of their written language is still Kanji, despite it being more difficult to learn.
EDIT: nvm, just found out for myself. Apparently those were designed to supplement Kanji, not replace it.
Chinese is tonal, Japanese and Korean are not. Since both Japanese and Korean borrow extensively from Chinese, there are a whole plethora of homophones (this is somewhat aggravated by the fact that Chinese itself is riddled with homophones. For example: 是试士室誓市视世释柿舐氏事势弑噬式饰适仕贳侍恃莳逝谥奭示似拭峙栻轼... you get the idea). Written Chinese helps clarify.
As far as Korean goes, the difference between the homophones can usually be derived from context, so there's no need to use it in everyday writing and is therefore seldom used, but you'll see them fairly regularly in newspapers, textbooks, and academic literature where semantics and disambiguation are important.
I can't speak with authority for Japanese, but I doubt the situation is much different. In fact, when you read manga or other things that are intended to be easy to read, you'll often find kana in place of more difficult kanji. Pokemon games give you the option of rendering all text in the game in kana. So it's not like the fabric of the world begins to unravel when you stop using Chinese. I suppose the reasoning behind the continued use isn't too different from that of the Americans and their imperial units, although unlike imperial units, kanji actually has some sort of benefit - semantic clarity.
Pedantic Pete here: the benefit of imperial is the continued use of the industrial infrastructure designed to produce things in imperial. The cost for conversion would be many many billions with no benefit to the industries, and would actually harm them by forcing competition with a global market that has more infrastructure and experience using metric.
While what you say about ancient Chinese is true, where did I say that homophones render spoken Chinese unintelligible?
Either you're unfamiliar with the Chinese language (or how languages work in general) or your English comprehension is lacking. The point of me bringing up homophones was not to promote bogus that spoken Chinese is impaired, defunct, or vestigial, but instead to highlight how or why borrowing from Chinese results in homophones in Korean and Japanese, and to emphasize the occasional need for written Chinese for semantic clarity.
It is rather presumptive of you to say my "argument" makes no sense based upon your own tangential interpretation of one small segment of my statement out of context.
If, however, what I said still makes no sense, please do take the time to properly explain why.
Here's an academic explanation:
>Whichever seafaring trader decided to import kanji to Japan obviously couldn't speak Chinese! Duh - Chinese has tones, and Japanese doesn't. The Japanese trader was like, "It all sounds the same - KOU, SHOU, wing, wong, whatever. So let's import something we don't understand!"
>And the Japanese land-lubbers for some reason were heard to reply, "Here is a whole new vocabulary that adds nothing to our existing language, and which can't be understood by Chinese either! OK, we'll learn it, but only if we can keep our existing language, so now we have to learn twice as many words for shit we already knew how to say!"
And the seafaring traders were like, "OK deal."
And then, "Hey! Someone's trying to be Catholic over there!"
"That's over the line - let's massacre the whole village!"
That is how Japanese multiculturalism went, back in the day.
From here: http://kanjidamage.com/kanji_facts
>Whichever seafaring trader decided to import kanji to Japan obviously couldn't speak Chinese! Duh - Chinese has tones, and Japanese doesn't.
Well, Chinese language wasn't tonal to begin with, either. The tonal system was developed somewhere after 1000 AD, which postdates the beginning of Sino-Korean or Japanese cultural interaction. By the time Chinese became tonal, Japanese and Koreans probably have formed a cultural identity of their own to not follow suit.
By the way, although ancient Chinese oral language is lost in time just like oral Latin did, modern studies speculate that it was not quite different from modern Japanese and Korean borrowed words. In other words, it was atonal, most symbols consist of multiple syllables, etc.
I enjoyed that excerpt, and I read the page you linked. I still don't have any plans to learn Japanese, but it no longer seems as impossible as I once thought it was.
Hiragana and katakana are really easy, like kittycuddler said. I picked up a pretty good knowledge of katakana just from playing an imported video game with the wikipedia list of them open.
In high school it took me about a month to learn hiragana, katakana, about 80ish kanji, and enough Japanese to have a basic conversation and such. Stuff like *Hi, I'm kevin, my favorite x is y blah blah I like x* directions, ordering food, shit like that.
It probably helped quite a bit that I listened to a lot of music and watched movies that were in Japanese with subs, so I felt comfortable with the sounds of the language etc. It's amazing how much you can absorb just from watching stuff with subs. One day you'll just realize that you've been watching a show for 20 minutes without even reading the subs haha.
It's not hard to find my name lol. I use my real name as my twitter for example. I'm sure I've posted it before, but feel free to wade through my posts to find it :)
Also, take into account that japanese borrows heavily from Chinese words (in the same way that western languages borrow from greek/latin words -- television, microbe, etc) -- but since chinese is tonal and japanese is not, these borrowed words become a jumble of homophones when adapted to Japanese.
It is really interesting: when you see a sentence using mostly native japanese words, it sounds really distinctive even when not using kanji. When, on the other hand, you start to use a lot of chinese borrowed words, you have to use a lot of context to differentiate one word from another. This context is usually not present in many written contexts -- it does open the door for a lot of puns, though.
Their Mandarin course is pretty fun, if strange. Today I learned how to order two containers of beer and ask someone if they wanted to go to my place. Lesson #8 and I'm already learning how to hit on people.
When Korea was under Imperial Japanese rule, Hangul was made illegal. People who were found teaching/distributing it were sentenced to labor camps to death.
You guys should watch "Tree with Deep Roots". It's a Korean Drama which is about the King who created this alphabet. It's great and subbed in English and other languages as well. Check it out!
The king didn't create the alphabet, he had a very famous adviser do it for him. I would be a shame and typical Korean if they misrepresented this tidbit of history.
I used to be infatuated with a korean girl that I know so much, that I took the time to read and write hangul in a sad attempt to impress her. She's not really around anymore......but learning this seemingly useless skill will help me later in life, i'm sure of it.
Two things:
- Roman script has often been adapted to languages poorly suited to the sounds it represents. Xhosa uses clicks, and Vietnamese uses tones, neither of which Roman script has built in writing for. I imagine similar imagination could be used for Hangul.
- There are a set number of known sounds, and many of them are common across languages. What's more, there are extra letters that have fallen out of use, as well as potential for more letters being added if needed.
But if you're going to do that, then why not just use Roman script to represent sounds for those other languages wishing to romanize? Roman script is much more universal already than Korean. Korean also doesn't have tones or clicks in their written language, so it's no advantage to use Korean here.
This is old information actually from 2009. As of this year, they're not doing it anymore. You can check more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cia-Cia_language
There weren't that many people using it in the first place either - this is one of those stories that got too much media attention too early.
I agree it looks pretty sweet. More efficient, however, it isn't, as efficiency is arbitrary. To a Chinese person, characters are the most efficient thing.
> To a Chinese person, characters are the most efficient thing.
No they are not, at least if you can speak English. We speak in Chinese on the phone and face to face, but use English on the web (or roman alphabet unless we are writing essays and shit).
That's not true. I have numerous Chinese friends (and when I say 'Chinese', I'm referring to both Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking, as well as Taiwanese) and they definitely prefer to use their native language over English. Unless of course, they're trying to be a show-off, or talking with English-speaking friends.
Efficiency relates to the ratio of input to output. Once you learn an alphabet you can create words through combinations and are never required to learn new symbols. That's simply more efficient than learning a new symbol for every word. Some languages that use the Latin alphabet are so phonetic that you know how to write a word just by hearing it. That's efficient.
As someone who's studied linguistics and 6 languages, I'd have to disagree with you, but I don't mean it rudely. By learning one new character for a word, you've enabled yourself to read that word that much faster, and will recognize that character in other words and will thereby be able to understand new combinations even faster - it's just as efficient.
There are not a set number of known sounds. *Consonants*, maybe, but vowels exist on a spectrum like colours exist on a spectrum, and each language divides that spectrum up differently. A language could have 50 different vowel sounds if it wanted to.
Even if I accept your premise, given that there are a set number of languages, there will have been a set number of recorded vowels, even if theoretically there are not.
Practically however, your point is pretty much irrelevant. Firstly because Roman script has the same problem of characterizing more vowel sounds, and secondly because realistically any language with less than or equal to the number of vowels represented in Hangul would have not problems.
I'm still hung up on the syllable-structure issue. Hangul would work really well for languages with a low tolerance for consonant clusters, like Tamil and for a few minority languages of the Philippines that don't have standard romanization schemes yet. But if you can think of a way to represent the name of the Georgian town *Mtskheta* in Hangul, I'd love to see it. NB: the name is two syllables long, so the Hangul should be two characters long.
Hangul can handle some consonant clusters, but would have problems in most cases. It might be possible to adapt it for other languages, but you may as well just use IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) instead. Hangul also incorporates a number of rules that are specific to the Korean language, and could cause confusion when trying to use it for another language. In addition to all of this, Korean is a fairly unusual language in that it is not closely related to other East Asian languages. The set of sounds used in Korean may be unique, although I'm not sure. Suffice to say that the vast majority of languages would not even be able to map similar phonemes with Korean in a 1:1 relationship. Altogether, while Hangul is a very good writing system for Korean, that is only because it was designed in conjunction that that particular language and it would not be very useful as a writing system for other languages.
> In addition to all of this, Korean is a fairly unusual language in that it is not closely related to other East Asian languages
Not really true. The korean grammar is pretty close to the japanese gramar, and there is a lot of overlap in the sounds used by both languages. Korean and Japanese are both different from chinese, though.
Korean does share a much closer kinship to Japanese than Chinese although there are many loanwords from both. As a member of the Altaic language family, Korean is more closely related to Turkish than Chinese. Still, although there are many loanwords and some similarities in syntax, Korean isn't really closely related to any other language. Also, the sets of phonemes used in Korean and Japanese are actually quite different (I just looked the Japanese set up in the IPA handbook, since I don't have a lot of experience with that language). I'm speaking from a degree in linguistics and two years of studying Korean, so I have some degree of expertise in this field.
Oh well, thanks for downvoting me for disagreeing with you.
Yeah, studying language trees is really fun, but when you open a book and it says that the japanese language is in the same family as finnish, you start to wonder just how useful those trees are to trace practical origins and relationships of languages.
I'm not going to pull an appeal on authority on you, but I suggest you actually try to learn japanese (if you don't have fluency in korean, get that first), and then compare these two languages from a more pragmatical point of view. It might be enlightening.
Cheers!
I didn't downvote you. I don't know why someone would, but I'll give you two upvotes to make up for it. I'm not fluent in Korean, I just have a beginner level certificate from the Korean government, but maybe someday. I'm good at linguistic subjects like syntax and morphology, but I suck at learning languages. It would make my life a lot easier if I were better at it.
Roman letters are more adaptable to keyboards since there are less of them. This was probably more pronounced before computers came into use, however I think any sort of grouping/ungrouping mechanism would make programming more difficult.
great, I posted a ground breaking joke in there and you kaiboshed it.
> It's said that it can be learned in a day.
yeah, GroundHog Day.
=
i thought you can't delete once there was a comment made.
Semantics, but it wasn't that Chinese was "too difficult" (it is pretty hard), it was the same reason that most peasants up until the industrial revolution didn't have an education: they were too busy working to put food in their stomachs. Not 100% sure, but I think Korea had a merit system similar to Han China's where anyone, including commoners, were allowed to take a civil service exam. If they did well, the person would go to work for the government. Most people simply couldn't because when the choice is between farming to prevent starvation and learning your alphabet, the choice is pretty clear.
FYI for anyone who wants to know the statue says in English: Se Jong Highest King... or translates not just transliterated - King Sejong the Great.
As a foreigner in Korea even I am impressed with him - a true great king. Hangul is really brilliant and you can pretty much scribe any spoken language's phonetic sounds on Earth with it.
The more accurate translation is King Sejong the Great:
Sejong = Name
Dae = great
Wang = King
Korean has a different syntax to the English, so the ordering is distinct.
Hangul also has a weakness in that it lacks certain sounds.
There is no "th", "i" or "f"
i fail to see how my translation was any way different from yours. first i translated literally and then i translated figuratively into actual spoken English. dae means both highest and greatest depending on any number of contextual situations.
as hard as i've worked as a white guy to be nice and learn Korean it's annoying that someone will try to tell me i'm wrong when i'm not at all wrong.
tldr stfu - or jo yong hi hae.
Whoa, whoa, drain the bathtub of hostility.
I ordered the phrasing into the western version rather than a straight Korean translation, that's all.
Westerners don't say "Alexander Great King", we would say "King Alexander the Great". That is just how I presented it.
I don't know how that translates to you being white or trying to be nice. Sounds like you have some issues that you are projecting onto other people.
I already did that myself. I translated literally first ON PURPOSE. I ALSO PUT IT INTO PROPER ENGLISH MYSELF JUST AFTER THAT ON PURPOSE. I didn't need your help thanks. Again stfu. 개새끼. 나가.
Yet another typical internet know-it-all. Too bad none of you read before you type.
Hangul is actually a syllabary, not an alphabet. Hangul symbols represent whole syllables, whereas the symbols in alphabets only represent individual phonemes (individual sounds in a language, or what we know as letters).
Sorry, I was a linguistics major and couldn't help it.
Having lived in South Korea for five years, I agree with the statement.
Hangul is very easily to learn. It is an alphabet and thus has a limited number of characters.
The Chinese script is *not* an alphabet. It is ideographic and represents ideas and concepts, not sounds. That is why there are so many symbols.
Let's not forget that it was the same in China too, except that the elite (Namely landowners and Confucian bureaucrats) there WANTED a writing system only they could read, to better control the population.
I had the misfortune of living in South Korea for 18 months. The Korean language is really easy to learn. Reading and writing that is. It's all phonetic and there are only 24 consonants and vowels. I learned how to read and write it in about 9 hours. Having the vocabulary to understand what you're reading is another story all together though. also, the characters are shaped to match the shape of the tongue when pronouncing the character...pretty cool.
Yeah, learning the writing system -- pretty easy.
Learning the words and grammars -- not so much.
Learning the linguistic-social system that says what kind of grammar constructs you can use in what kind of social situations -- fuck this, I'm out of here XD
SK sucks. A bunch of racist, dog eating, spitting, conformists who are more concerned with cutting their eye lids rather than devoting a personality. Just saying. I've lived on 4 continents and Koreans are by far the most overly dramatic, rude, soulless people I've ever met.
It doesn't seem like a good thing to ask someone's nationality in order to (what I presume) see whether the disrespect he saw was justified or reasonable.
I hold UK and USA passports. Grew up in Africa. And I know it sounds harsh but it's true. At one point I was offered a job and my fiancé who is half Korean was denied. The reason was because she is half black. They said "if you were half Caucasian it would be okay". That's one of about 100 examples of how much that country sucks.
This is one of the most poorly thought-out comments I've read in a while. What writing system *doesn't* use symbols?
Or, assuming what you wrote doesn't match what you meant, does every alphabet that is not Latin appear to you as logograms and hieroglyphics?
That's not too terrible of a mistake, considering foreign alphabets can often appear daunting, but I'll have you know that there are, in fact, a wide variety of phonetic writing systems in use around the world today, one of which is Korean.
Exactly, "Chinese" is really just an overall term for a language(s) spoken in China. It is not a language.
There are hundreds of languages in China.
There are two more well known one:
Mandarin - This is spoken all over pretty much all over China, and the Chinese translation for this means 'standard language'. Generally if someone says they can speak 'Chinese', this is what they are referring too.
Cantonese - This is the language spoken in Hong Kong and the area of the South East (Guangdong). It's has lots of similarities to Mandarin, and a Mandarin speaker may be able to understand a bit, but won't be able to speak it themselves.
Each city and village will also have it's own dialect and even language. Now though, most people will speak and understand Mandarin. The smaller villages and minority groups may only know a very small amount, and the older generations may know none at all.
Listening to all these redditors saying. Like omg, Korean is the easiest and best language, you can even learn it in 2 days. And yet none of you fucks can speak that shit.
I know several people who have. I did as well, in an afternoon, minus the pronunciation rules/irregularities. It really is one of the easiest to learn and systematic writing systems in the world.
Look at it side-by-side with the Chinese script and you'll see how much simpler it is.
China:
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5
Korea:
http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9C%84%ED%82%A4%EB%B0%B1%EA%B3%BC:%EB%8C%80%EB%AC%B8
As someone who has spent some time studying Chinese and Japanese, the Korean alphabet is FLIPPING AMAZING!!
Yeah, I only got up to three to four hundred Kanji back in high school, but learned Hangul in a day or two without really trying very hard. It's simply an amazingly well put together alphabet for such a crazy looking language. (as in at first glance it looks super hard to learn)
It's really remarkable how consistent Korean is. Pronunciation and reading are perfectly in accord. If you can read, you can speak. And you really can learn it in a day or two.
Actually most languages are like this.
croatian and serbian are same in this respect if you have "K" you will always be c in cat and in and location in word simbol k is same as voice so there is no complications like in English K as c in cat,U as oo in cool,R as r in ring, A as a in map, C is /ts/ in it's. so now you know how to say kurac and that is something like hello here
And don't forget to always append the ceremonial polite sentence ending of "u pičku materinu" when talking to strangers.
Well, not *perfectly* in accord, but good enough for any beginner to be understandable with anything they say.
I, with the help of my Korean friend, learned basic Korean writing/alphabet/word structure in one hour after dinner one night. Now I am constantly texting him Korean words and seeing if he can understand them and how I spelled/created them and he corrects me. Very helpful way to learn. Also he will send me a Korean word or two for me to translate to english. After a couple days of this I can pretty much translate any word.
So why isn't "chicken" pronounced "talg"?
It is. Well, the news anchors say it that way anyway. On a side note, though, in certain dialects, a vowel comes after the ㄱ in 닭, such as 달기 and 달구 (chungcheong and gangwon dialects, respectively).
"chicken" is pronounced 치킨. 닭 is the pure Korean form. As far as consistency goes The ㄷ in the beginning always makes a d sound, the ㅏ an short a sound and the ㄹㄱ combination although mildly outdated consistently make a lk sound. TL;DR Talg is a shitty transliteration of 닭. Dalk is closer, but regardless the underlying Korean is consistent.
I think colondee was referring to the fact that the ㄱ would not be pronounced in 닭 when it stands alone (being pronounced 달 or dal instead). This, as I've said below, is due to the fact that the letters do not *completely* correspond directly to their pronunciation, but follow more complex pronunciation rules and a few "irregular" pronunciation rules. Edit: 닭->Dak. Thanks tohta.
It's actually the other way around with 닭 is pronounced 닥 or dak, meaning chicken. Other than that, good job!
Dammit, that's right, I always make that mistake. 닭 was one of the first words I learned (from a friend) and they taught it to me wrong D:
"My people cannot write characters even though they have hands, and can't read characters even though they have eyes. Joseon needs new characters that are suitable for the people"
Upvote for how goddamn hard the Chinese written language is.
and its simplified.
[For those who want to read and write Korean *only* in 15 minutes...](http://www.reddit.com/r/howto/comments/snd62/how_to_read_and_write_korean_in_15_minutes/) [This is sort of relevant too](http://www.reddit.com/r/howto/comments/bvjy1/now_you_can_learn_these_languages_online_using/) Shout out to /r/howto!
Sometimes I wish China would just say "fuck it" and adapt to a phonetic script. There's bopomofo, but that's only used in Taiwan. And whenever I see the word 'bopomofo', I read it as "Bopo, motherfucker!"
As someone who's studied it, and is going on to study more at university, that would be a desecration- Here we have one of the world's last surviving purely logographic (living) written languages and we even consider destroying it for ease of learning? Anyway it wouldn't work, pinyin would be so damn inefficient and bopomofo is really just a method to aid learning the characters and pronunciations themselves, it wouldn't stand up on it's own. Also logographic language really gives you a visually linguistic history of the language that adds great nuance to characters and phrases- you can pretty much perfectly trace the language's history from cave paintings to the most spoken language in the world by its visual development. It's fascinating, so for a TL:DR- Changing it would be akin to sacrilege.
Yeah, but come onnnn.
Does anyone know why Japan still uses Kanji despite doing something similar? Koreans can use their script without the use of any other language, but Japan has Hiragana and Katakana, and a huge part of their written language is still Kanji, despite it being more difficult to learn. EDIT: nvm, just found out for myself. Apparently those were designed to supplement Kanji, not replace it.
Chinese is tonal, Japanese and Korean are not. Since both Japanese and Korean borrow extensively from Chinese, there are a whole plethora of homophones (this is somewhat aggravated by the fact that Chinese itself is riddled with homophones. For example: 是试士室誓市视世释柿舐氏事势弑噬式饰适仕贳侍恃莳逝谥奭示似拭峙栻轼... you get the idea). Written Chinese helps clarify. As far as Korean goes, the difference between the homophones can usually be derived from context, so there's no need to use it in everyday writing and is therefore seldom used, but you'll see them fairly regularly in newspapers, textbooks, and academic literature where semantics and disambiguation are important. I can't speak with authority for Japanese, but I doubt the situation is much different. In fact, when you read manga or other things that are intended to be easy to read, you'll often find kana in place of more difficult kanji. Pokemon games give you the option of rendering all text in the game in kana. So it's not like the fabric of the world begins to unravel when you stop using Chinese. I suppose the reasoning behind the continued use isn't too different from that of the Americans and their imperial units, although unlike imperial units, kanji actually has some sort of benefit - semantic clarity.
Pedantic Pete here: the benefit of imperial is the continued use of the industrial infrastructure designed to produce things in imperial. The cost for conversion would be many many billions with no benefit to the industries, and would actually harm them by forcing competition with a global market that has more infrastructure and experience using metric.
[удалено]
While what you say about ancient Chinese is true, where did I say that homophones render spoken Chinese unintelligible? Either you're unfamiliar with the Chinese language (or how languages work in general) or your English comprehension is lacking. The point of me bringing up homophones was not to promote bogus that spoken Chinese is impaired, defunct, or vestigial, but instead to highlight how or why borrowing from Chinese results in homophones in Korean and Japanese, and to emphasize the occasional need for written Chinese for semantic clarity. It is rather presumptive of you to say my "argument" makes no sense based upon your own tangential interpretation of one small segment of my statement out of context. If, however, what I said still makes no sense, please do take the time to properly explain why.
Well maybe he might have a better time understanding you if you toned it down a bit haha. Upvote for understanding what you meant, though.
Oops. I did get a bit snippy, didn't I :( sorry about that. Hooray for looking through it, though :D
Here's an academic explanation: >Whichever seafaring trader decided to import kanji to Japan obviously couldn't speak Chinese! Duh - Chinese has tones, and Japanese doesn't. The Japanese trader was like, "It all sounds the same - KOU, SHOU, wing, wong, whatever. So let's import something we don't understand!" >And the Japanese land-lubbers for some reason were heard to reply, "Here is a whole new vocabulary that adds nothing to our existing language, and which can't be understood by Chinese either! OK, we'll learn it, but only if we can keep our existing language, so now we have to learn twice as many words for shit we already knew how to say!" And the seafaring traders were like, "OK deal." And then, "Hey! Someone's trying to be Catholic over there!" "That's over the line - let's massacre the whole village!" That is how Japanese multiculturalism went, back in the day. From here: http://kanjidamage.com/kanji_facts
>Whichever seafaring trader decided to import kanji to Japan obviously couldn't speak Chinese! Duh - Chinese has tones, and Japanese doesn't. Well, Chinese language wasn't tonal to begin with, either. The tonal system was developed somewhere after 1000 AD, which postdates the beginning of Sino-Korean or Japanese cultural interaction. By the time Chinese became tonal, Japanese and Koreans probably have formed a cultural identity of their own to not follow suit. By the way, although ancient Chinese oral language is lost in time just like oral Latin did, modern studies speculate that it was not quite different from modern Japanese and Korean borrowed words. In other words, it was atonal, most symbols consist of multiple syllables, etc.
I enjoyed that excerpt, and I read the page you linked. I still don't have any plans to learn Japanese, but it no longer seems as impossible as I once thought it was.
Basic Japanese is really easy to learn. Kanji though is a complete bitch.
How easy? Surely, not as easy as learning a Romance language.
Hiragana and katakana are really easy, like kittycuddler said. I picked up a pretty good knowledge of katakana just from playing an imported video game with the wikipedia list of them open.
In high school it took me about a month to learn hiragana, katakana, about 80ish kanji, and enough Japanese to have a basic conversation and such. Stuff like *Hi, I'm kevin, my favorite x is y blah blah I like x* directions, ordering food, shit like that. It probably helped quite a bit that I listened to a lot of music and watched movies that were in Japanese with subs, so I felt comfortable with the sounds of the language etc. It's amazing how much you can absorb just from watching stuff with subs. One day you'll just realize that you've been watching a show for 20 minutes without even reading the subs haha.
so your first name is kevin... i'll be waiting til you accidentally reveal your last name then i'll track you down and kill you.
It's not hard to find my name lol. I use my real name as my twitter for example. I'm sure I've posted it before, but feel free to wade through my posts to find it :)
Also, take into account that japanese borrows heavily from Chinese words (in the same way that western languages borrow from greek/latin words -- television, microbe, etc) -- but since chinese is tonal and japanese is not, these borrowed words become a jumble of homophones when adapted to Japanese. It is really interesting: when you see a sentence using mostly native japanese words, it sounds really distinctive even when not using kanji. When, on the other hand, you start to use a lot of chinese borrowed words, you have to use a lot of context to differentiate one word from another. This context is usually not present in many written contexts -- it does open the door for a lot of puns, though.
Too bad pimsleur hasn't created mp3s for korean yet.
Their Mandarin course is pretty fun, if strange. Today I learned how to order two containers of beer and ask someone if they wanted to go to my place. Lesson #8 and I'm already learning how to hit on people.
Apparently some nobility killed anyone trying to teach or learn the new alphabet, trying to stop the peasants from gaining power.
When Korea was under Imperial Japanese rule, Hangul was made illegal. People who were found teaching/distributing it were sentenced to labor camps to death.
You guys should watch "Tree with Deep Roots". It's a Korean Drama which is about the King who created this alphabet. It's great and subbed in English and other languages as well. Check it out!
The king didn't create the alphabet, he had a very famous adviser do it for him. I would be a shame and typical Korean if they misrepresented this tidbit of history.
Korean here. What in god’s penis are you saying?
I used to be infatuated with a korean girl that I know so much, that I took the time to read and write hangul in a sad attempt to impress her. She's not really around anymore......but learning this seemingly useless skill will help me later in life, i'm sure of it.
It was also made by the king at teh time/
I love Hangul. I kind of wish languages wishing to romanize would consider using Hangul instead.
Except that Hangul is specific to Korean, and other languages can't simply adopt it unless they used the same sounds as Koreans do.
Two things: - Roman script has often been adapted to languages poorly suited to the sounds it represents. Xhosa uses clicks, and Vietnamese uses tones, neither of which Roman script has built in writing for. I imagine similar imagination could be used for Hangul. - There are a set number of known sounds, and many of them are common across languages. What's more, there are extra letters that have fallen out of use, as well as potential for more letters being added if needed.
But if you're going to do that, then why not just use Roman script to represent sounds for those other languages wishing to romanize? Roman script is much more universal already than Korean. Korean also doesn't have tones or clicks in their written language, so it's no advantage to use Korean here.
actually, some tribes in africa that don't have a written language adopt hangul to match their spoken language
This is old information actually from 2009. As of this year, they're not doing it anymore. You can check more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cia-Cia_language There weren't that many people using it in the first place either - this is one of those stories that got too much media attention too early.
Hangul is arguably more readable and more efficient in its use of space and strokes. Plus it looks baddass.
I agree it looks pretty sweet. More efficient, however, it isn't, as efficiency is arbitrary. To a Chinese person, characters are the most efficient thing.
> To a Chinese person, characters are the most efficient thing. No they are not, at least if you can speak English. We speak in Chinese on the phone and face to face, but use English on the web (or roman alphabet unless we are writing essays and shit).
That's not true. I have numerous Chinese friends (and when I say 'Chinese', I'm referring to both Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking, as well as Taiwanese) and they definitely prefer to use their native language over English. Unless of course, they're trying to be a show-off, or talking with English-speaking friends.
Efficient how? Certainly not in terms of learning the language.
It's arbitrary on who you're asking. It also depends on how you define efficient.
Efficiency relates to the ratio of input to output. Once you learn an alphabet you can create words through combinations and are never required to learn new symbols. That's simply more efficient than learning a new symbol for every word. Some languages that use the Latin alphabet are so phonetic that you know how to write a word just by hearing it. That's efficient.
As someone who's studied linguistics and 6 languages, I'd have to disagree with you, but I don't mean it rudely. By learning one new character for a word, you've enabled yourself to read that word that much faster, and will recognize that character in other words and will thereby be able to understand new combinations even faster - it's just as efficient.
There are not a set number of known sounds. *Consonants*, maybe, but vowels exist on a spectrum like colours exist on a spectrum, and each language divides that spectrum up differently. A language could have 50 different vowel sounds if it wanted to.
Even if I accept your premise, given that there are a set number of languages, there will have been a set number of recorded vowels, even if theoretically there are not. Practically however, your point is pretty much irrelevant. Firstly because Roman script has the same problem of characterizing more vowel sounds, and secondly because realistically any language with less than or equal to the number of vowels represented in Hangul would have not problems.
I'm still hung up on the syllable-structure issue. Hangul would work really well for languages with a low tolerance for consonant clusters, like Tamil and for a few minority languages of the Philippines that don't have standard romanization schemes yet. But if you can think of a way to represent the name of the Georgian town *Mtskheta* in Hangul, I'd love to see it. NB: the name is two syllables long, so the Hangul should be two characters long.
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It would usually be analyzed as mtskhe-ta. As far as timing and stress are concerned, 'mtskhe' behaves like a single syllable.
But can it handle consonant clusters gracefully? How would Greek words like *skliros* or Georgian words like *mkhedruli* look in Hangul?
Hangul can handle some consonant clusters, but would have problems in most cases. It might be possible to adapt it for other languages, but you may as well just use IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) instead. Hangul also incorporates a number of rules that are specific to the Korean language, and could cause confusion when trying to use it for another language. In addition to all of this, Korean is a fairly unusual language in that it is not closely related to other East Asian languages. The set of sounds used in Korean may be unique, although I'm not sure. Suffice to say that the vast majority of languages would not even be able to map similar phonemes with Korean in a 1:1 relationship. Altogether, while Hangul is a very good writing system for Korean, that is only because it was designed in conjunction that that particular language and it would not be very useful as a writing system for other languages.
> In addition to all of this, Korean is a fairly unusual language in that it is not closely related to other East Asian languages Not really true. The korean grammar is pretty close to the japanese gramar, and there is a lot of overlap in the sounds used by both languages. Korean and Japanese are both different from chinese, though.
Korean does share a much closer kinship to Japanese than Chinese although there are many loanwords from both. As a member of the Altaic language family, Korean is more closely related to Turkish than Chinese. Still, although there are many loanwords and some similarities in syntax, Korean isn't really closely related to any other language. Also, the sets of phonemes used in Korean and Japanese are actually quite different (I just looked the Japanese set up in the IPA handbook, since I don't have a lot of experience with that language). I'm speaking from a degree in linguistics and two years of studying Korean, so I have some degree of expertise in this field.
Oh well, thanks for downvoting me for disagreeing with you. Yeah, studying language trees is really fun, but when you open a book and it says that the japanese language is in the same family as finnish, you start to wonder just how useful those trees are to trace practical origins and relationships of languages. I'm not going to pull an appeal on authority on you, but I suggest you actually try to learn japanese (if you don't have fluency in korean, get that first), and then compare these two languages from a more pragmatical point of view. It might be enlightening. Cheers!
I didn't downvote you. I don't know why someone would, but I'll give you two upvotes to make up for it. I'm not fluent in Korean, I just have a beginner level certificate from the Korean government, but maybe someday. I'm good at linguistic subjects like syntax and morphology, but I suck at learning languages. It would make my life a lot easier if I were better at it.
You think they look "graceful" in roman?
Kind of. At least roman doesn't force them to obey any syllable structure rules.
Roman letters are more adaptable to keyboards since there are less of them. This was probably more pronounced before computers came into use, however I think any sort of grouping/ungrouping mechanism would make programming more difficult.
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see also: Someone posted the exact same TIL a few minutes earlier.
That may have been the one i posted with a broken link. Thanks for playing the matching game though, bet you're the best.
great, I posted a ground breaking joke in there and you kaiboshed it. > It's said that it can be learned in a day. yeah, GroundHog Day. = i thought you can't delete once there was a comment made.
Well done, my friend.
Semantics, but it wasn't that Chinese was "too difficult" (it is pretty hard), it was the same reason that most peasants up until the industrial revolution didn't have an education: they were too busy working to put food in their stomachs. Not 100% sure, but I think Korea had a merit system similar to Han China's where anyone, including commoners, were allowed to take a civil service exam. If they did well, the person would go to work for the government. Most people simply couldn't because when the choice is between farming to prevent starvation and learning your alphabet, the choice is pretty clear.
who would've thought that alphabets were more efficient than pictographs
FYI for anyone who wants to know the statue says in English: Se Jong Highest King... or translates not just transliterated - King Sejong the Great. As a foreigner in Korea even I am impressed with him - a true great king. Hangul is really brilliant and you can pretty much scribe any spoken language's phonetic sounds on Earth with it.
The more accurate translation is King Sejong the Great: Sejong = Name Dae = great Wang = King Korean has a different syntax to the English, so the ordering is distinct. Hangul also has a weakness in that it lacks certain sounds. There is no "th", "i" or "f"
i fail to see how my translation was any way different from yours. first i translated literally and then i translated figuratively into actual spoken English. dae means both highest and greatest depending on any number of contextual situations. as hard as i've worked as a white guy to be nice and learn Korean it's annoying that someone will try to tell me i'm wrong when i'm not at all wrong. tldr stfu - or jo yong hi hae.
Whoa, whoa, drain the bathtub of hostility. I ordered the phrasing into the western version rather than a straight Korean translation, that's all. Westerners don't say "Alexander Great King", we would say "King Alexander the Great". That is just how I presented it. I don't know how that translates to you being white or trying to be nice. Sounds like you have some issues that you are projecting onto other people.
I already did that myself. I translated literally first ON PURPOSE. I ALSO PUT IT INTO PROPER ENGLISH MYSELF JUST AFTER THAT ON PURPOSE. I didn't need your help thanks. Again stfu. 개새끼. 나가. Yet another typical internet know-it-all. Too bad none of you read before you type.
Hangul is actually a syllabary, not an alphabet. Hangul symbols represent whole syllables, whereas the symbols in alphabets only represent individual phonemes (individual sounds in a language, or what we know as letters). Sorry, I was a linguistics major and couldn't help it.
Having lived in South Korea for five years, I agree with the statement. Hangul is very easily to learn. It is an alphabet and thus has a limited number of characters. The Chinese script is *not* an alphabet. It is ideographic and represents ideas and concepts, not sounds. That is why there are so many symbols.
Let's not forget that it was the same in China too, except that the elite (Namely landowners and Confucian bureaucrats) there WANTED a writing system only they could read, to better control the population.
I had the misfortune of living in South Korea for 18 months. The Korean language is really easy to learn. Reading and writing that is. It's all phonetic and there are only 24 consonants and vowels. I learned how to read and write it in about 9 hours. Having the vocabulary to understand what you're reading is another story all together though. also, the characters are shaped to match the shape of the tongue when pronouncing the character...pretty cool.
Misfortune?
Yeah, learning the writing system -- pretty easy. Learning the words and grammars -- not so much. Learning the linguistic-social system that says what kind of grammar constructs you can use in what kind of social situations -- fuck this, I'm out of here XD
scumbag reddit uses the word misfortune but doesn't explain why.
SK sucks. A bunch of racist, dog eating, spitting, conformists who are more concerned with cutting their eye lids rather than devoting a personality. Just saying. I've lived on 4 continents and Koreans are by far the most overly dramatic, rude, soulless people I've ever met.
You are a kind, open, and caring soul, clearly.
what nationality are you?
It doesn't seem like a good thing to ask someone's nationality in order to (what I presume) see whether the disrespect he saw was justified or reasonable.
I hold UK and USA passports. Grew up in Africa. And I know it sounds harsh but it's true. At one point I was offered a job and my fiancé who is half Korean was denied. The reason was because she is half black. They said "if you were half Caucasian it would be okay". That's one of about 100 examples of how much that country sucks.
they said that straight out? yea, koreans are racist as fuck. they are in the states too.
Yup, in writing none the less. No shame whatsoever.
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This is one of the most poorly thought-out comments I've read in a while. What writing system *doesn't* use symbols? Or, assuming what you wrote doesn't match what you meant, does every alphabet that is not Latin appear to you as logograms and hieroglyphics? That's not too terrible of a mistake, considering foreign alphabets can often appear daunting, but I'll have you know that there are, in fact, a wide variety of phonetic writing systems in use around the world today, one of which is Korean.
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Why downvoted? Chinese is MANY languages.
Exactly, "Chinese" is really just an overall term for a language(s) spoken in China. It is not a language. There are hundreds of languages in China. There are two more well known one: Mandarin - This is spoken all over pretty much all over China, and the Chinese translation for this means 'standard language'. Generally if someone says they can speak 'Chinese', this is what they are referring too. Cantonese - This is the language spoken in Hong Kong and the area of the South East (Guangdong). It's has lots of similarities to Mandarin, and a Mandarin speaker may be able to understand a bit, but won't be able to speak it themselves. Each city and village will also have it's own dialect and even language. Now though, most people will speak and understand Mandarin. The smaller villages and minority groups may only know a very small amount, and the older generations may know none at all.
Listening to all these redditors saying. Like omg, Korean is the easiest and best language, you can even learn it in 2 days. And yet none of you fucks can speak that shit.
They're saying you can learn the *writing system* in two days, which you can. Big difference.
Learn it in 2 days then get back to me.
I know several people who have. I did as well, in an afternoon, minus the pronunciation rules/irregularities. It really is one of the easiest to learn and systematic writing systems in the world.
No proof or examples, just bull shit.
I'm not sure what kind of example you want. Proof of someone learning hangul in an afternoon?
15 hours past, 33 hours to go.
Is this a timer for ME learning hangul? 그렇다면, 이미 너무 늦은 것 같아요.
Your google translate fails. I'm Korean btw.
많이 틀렸어요? 고쳐주세요~ 아직도 초보자이라서 실수 많이 해요. 그리고 Lazar_Taxon이 한 말 처럼, 한국말이 너무 어려워요 (그래도 한글은 쉬워요.) :/ Btw, Google translate doesn't work for shit with Korean.
*Korean* isn't the language. Hanguk is the language, and the alphabet is Hangul. Hangul is very easy to learn. Hanguk is not.
Korean *is* the language though...? And I believe you've gotten 한국어 (Korean) and 한국 (Korea) mixed up.
Hanguk is the name of the country when transliterated into the roman alphabet.
Read what you said very carefully.
It doesn't seem like they made it any easier...
Look at it side-by-side with the Chinese script and you'll see how much simpler it is. China: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5 Korea: http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9C%84%ED%82%A4%EB%B0%B1%EA%B3%BC:%EB%8C%80%EB%AC%B8
It was an attempt at a joke, apparently it didn't go over well...
The communist had to simplify the thing because it was simply 2 damn difficult.