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ennime wrote:
Honestly, these arguments around Hanja or no Hanja… if learning and
knowing hanja is a necessity to get true fluency, then there is an entire generation of
Koreans who don’t speak their own language fluent (plus the majority of north
koreans)…

Come on now, one’s saying that Koreans are less fluent in their own native tongue
because they don’t use hanja… Just that the lack of hanja makes it more difficult for
learners of the language to figure out and remember unfamiliar words. I’m not
sure what’s so controversial about this statement.

I have never studied Korean, but in Japanese I am sure that the kanji makes reading
really smooth for me even if I haven’t studied many words on the page before. On the
occasions that I’ve had to read something in hiragana/romaji, it was a real struggle to
figure out unfamiliar words based on context alone and tell apart all those homonyms
(e.g. my dictionary shows over 20 possibilities for the pronunciation 「しょうこう」.)
As a few before me have said, learning kanji is a big hurdle that, once you clear it,
pays dividends in the long-run.

Korean seems to have less homonyms than Japanese in its Sinetic loanwords, due to a
richer phoneme inventory. So I imagine that this would be less of a problem in Korean
than in Japanese, and therefore learning the hanja would provide a smaller payoff for
the learner’s efforts . But
posts on this thread by Korean learners suggest that homonyms are still is a great
problem nonetheless. So that observation combined with my experience with kanji in
Japanese makes me very ready to believe the Professor’s assertion that the hanja are
needed for a learner to gain a strong command of the vocabulary. Particularly,
his report of hitting a brick wall with regard to vocabulary, and then his vocab
acquisition “snowballing” after he learned the hanja immediately rang some bells with
me as a Japanese learner and teacher. When Korean learners claim the hanja aren’t
necessary for a learner, and appear to be baffled by the Professor’s statement, I
wonder if it’s because they simply have never tried. Of course, this is just
speculation, and I’d be interested in hearing from a Korean learner who has learned at
least a few hundred hanja, who doesn’t feel satisfied that it was necessary.

Those who are averse to learning the hanja in Korean usually say “Nobody uses them
anymore”, “You can get along just fine without them”, “Even the native speakers hardly
know them, and they seem to be speaking just fine”. Again, I haven’t studied Korean,
but I think that the needs of an L2 learner are not quite the same as those of a native
speaker. When Asians learn English, they often have to study Greek and Latin roots.
What percent of (non-language geek) native English speakers can tell you that the root
of “dictionary” and “contradict” has to do with speaking? Do we even need to know? But
for a learner of English without a history in that tradition, they’re a great help in
acquiring new vocabulary.

Edited by Lucky Charms on 14 February 2011 at 4:27am
4 persons have voted this message useful

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In my opinion, you can achieve true fluency without knowing hanja, but you’ll need an (for foreign students) unrealistic amount of exposure. If a Korean native could, at one time in history, learn it in 20 years of full exposure while covering a wide range of topics at school, doesn’t mean a foreign learner of the language can do the same. Even then, I can’t imagine handling some professional topics without hanja knowledge.

I resisted learning hanja for a long time, even though I learned a lot of kanji when studying Japanese. I found it hard to learn something you never see. Hanja are always there, but hidden like behind a curtain of hangeul. So you don’t have that automatic reinforcement you have when you read Japanese and reinforce the kanji.
What got me study them in the end, was 1. those rare sinokorean words you only encounter once a year or so, they are often so much easier to remember if you know the hanja or know at least one of the hanja and 2. without hanja it’s hard to distinguish between similar sinokorean words. There are so many words that somewhat mean the same but differ a little in connotation. Hanja helps to keep these words apart.

I don’t know if learning Korean is harder than learning Japanese.
But in my case it was a lot more confusing and frustrating. So maybe it’s not more difficult but for some people it feels like it is, because of the confusion and frustration.

—-

I never understood how Hanja really help that much in the learning process.
When you get to a certain point in your studies where it becomes necessary to
distinguish hard words/very similar words/ words with the same roots, then you’re
already in my experience at the point where you can tell what nuance the words in
question have without knowing any separate system of writing.

What is 한정, and how it is different from 제한, 제한 from 제약, etc?
This is something you could learn by going through the 1800 or so hanja that some
generations learn…
Or you could simply go by what you already know based on everything you’ve seen that
has the character 제 in it, and the same for 정, and 한, etc.

Simply thinking about that has always given me whatever nuance or understanding was
needed.
Also I get a much more vivid picture of what something means when I base it on words I
have already learnt, as opposed to on a whole new system I need to get used to.

To what is the difference between 성립 and 확립? One can know it if they’ve learnt the
Hanja, but one could understand it better, and how to use it, if they have heard of 구
성, 확정, etc
You can do it just as well without learning the characters tied to each word honestly.
That Korean learning generally does not include Hanja is probably something that counts
towards it being easier (easier than if it did include Hanja, not easier that Japanese
necessarily)

—
That is certainly a valid point, and if it suits you then that’s great, more time
saved.

It wouldn’t work for me, since I have only studied 325 Hanja so far but I already know
7 사’s (社, 事, 史, 使, 四, 死, 寫), 6 화’s (化, 和, 話, 花, 畵, 火), 6 전’s (全, 戰, 電, 前,
傳, 典) et cetera. For me, at least, having these Hanjas as visual clues to remember
the different possible meanings for similar syllables has actually made it easier. You
seem to be fluent in Korean though, which is great if you can understand the advanced
vocab without Hanja. On the other hand, for learners like me, it is a useful tool.

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