Schooling in Korea

[Takakoo]

I was wondering - Do Koreans learn Chinese characters in school? I was doodling some Kanji in paint (on a compuer pod) the other day when a Korean guy sitting a few seats across pointed at it and almost shouted out the English meaning.

 

[Colin]

They sure do:
Hanja - Wikipedia

 

[lexico]

Thanks for the link, Colin-san. I had answered a similar question on this forum once which supplements the wiki info.

Korean people having a hard time reading texts written only with Hangeul, the Korean alphabet. Is this true ?

Update on linked post: Recently several newspapers started placing hanja ﾅ?ﾂｿﾅｽﾅ｡ in superscript in the editorials. Let me verify the details and come back to you on this.

 

[Kara_Nari]

Yeah, I have some friends who cant read it though, even though they were supposed to learn it at school. However a lot of these friends left Korea before grasping the complete concept of Hanja, and then went back when everyone else knew it.
Korean newspapers in NZ have a little Hanja in them, but then they also have Korean school on Saturdays too, where the kids go to learn Hanja, and other things on Korea, culture, and to improve their korean language when they are using English everyday.

 

[Takakoo]

Wow, I never knew that there was that much connection between Chinese/Korean/Japanese. ☝

So some of the Korean readings are similar to the Chinese readings. Does this make it any easier to go from one language to the other?

 

[lexico]

Wow, I never knew that there was that much connection between Chinese/Korean/Japanese. ☝

You could compare written Chinese (or Classical Chinese, ﾅ?ﾂｿ窶｢ﾂｶ, loosely ﾅ津??｢ﾂｶ) to classical Latin or Greek in the European cultures; as Chinese since the Han dynasties down to the Tang-Song dynasty was the lingua franca of East Asia. See ToMach's post. A bit outdated info from wikipedia; Influence on other languages. Esp. the remark on N.Korea is inaccurate as I have shown in my first post's link.

So some of the Korean readings are similar to the Chinese readings. Does this make it any easier to go from one language to the other ?

Probably as much as the shared heritage makes the transition easy when going from French to Italian, or English to German, although it is not clear whether Korean and Japanese are genetically related, and although it is clear that both Korean and Japanese are NOT genetically related to Chinese. The whole vocabulary of roughly 20,000-50,000 Chinese characters were borrowed into Korean and Japanese over time; the process starting not later than 3rd century BCE in the case of Korea, not later than 1st century CE in the case of Japan.

Personally my familiarity with Sino-Korean made my studies in Mandarin, classical Chinese, Chinese epigraphy, and etymology vastly more interesting although I have excercised caution not to expect Sino-Korean to literally translate into whatever Chinese. The historical, geographical, and political process of language variation is just too great to lend much credibility to such an assumption although I have more often encountered matches and similarities than otherwise.

This should not however discourage a person from a non-Asian mother tongue to consider the task of a language "transition" from one to another impossible or insurmountablly difficult. I would assume for a person with adequate knowledge in spoken and written Japanese to be wonderfully inspired and encouraged by his primary exposure to kanji when wanting to learn either Korean or a language of Chinese origin such as Mandarin, Shanghainese, or Cantonese.