12.2 Hangul, Hanja, and Looking Things Up — Epoché
What you will be able to do Give the outline history of Hangul-only writing against mixed script, and say what a Korean newspaper looks like today. Say roughly what proportion of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin, and why that does not mean you must learn Chinese characters now. Look a word up in Korean dictionary order, and say where 까 falls relative to 가 and 나 . Use this library's reading page to get a gloss, a reading and a translation without leaving the text. Prerequisites : 0.6, which taught you to assemble blocks, type on a two-set keyboard and read dictionary order. See lesson 0.6 Hangul if you have not done it. Two questions come up early for every learner of Korean and both have honest answers that take a page. The first is about Chinese characters: how much of the vocabulary is Chinese in origin, whether you need the characters, and when. The second is about looking things up, which in Korean is easier than in Chinese and stranger than in English. This lesson answers both, and it ends with the tools this library gives you. Hangul only, or Hangul with Hanja For most of the five centuries after 1446, serious Korean writing used Chinese characters — either Classical Chinese outright, or Korean sentences in which the content words were written with characters and the grammatical endings with Hangul. That second arrangement is mixed script, and if you look at a Korean newspaper from the 1960s you will see it: a page dense with characters, with Hangul filling the joints. Two things ended it. The South adopted a Hangul-only policy in stages after 1948, with exceptions and reversals along the way, and the North abolished Chinese characters early and completely. And then the practice changed faster than the policy: readers who had learned less Hanja at school simply stopped buying newspapers that used it. What you meet now is this. Ordinary published Korean — news, novels, subtitles, signs, packaging, everything on a phone — is Hangul only. Chinese characters survive in four places: in parentheses after a word whose meaning would otherwise be ambiguous, in personal names on formal documents, in some academic and legal writing, and as decoration on things that want to look old. A learner can read Korean for years without needing them. Korean English 톰은 신문을 읽고 있어요. [1] Tom is reading a newspaper. 한글 배우는 게 어렵지 않습니까? [2] Isn't learning Hangul difficult? The second sentence is in the 합니다 style rather than the 해요 style this phase uses, because that is how the corpus has it and the corpus is not rewritten here. The second phase gives you that style properly. Read it and notice only the shape of the question for now. Half the vocabulary, and why it waits Counts vary with the corpus and with what you decide to count, but the figure usually given is that between fifty and sixty per cent of the words in a Korean dictionary are Sino-Korean — built from elements borrowed from Chinese, each of which corresponds to one character and one Korean syllable. In running speech the proportion is lower, because the commonest words are mostly native. In technical and formal writing it is higher. That is a large fact and it has an obvious implication: learn the characters and half the vocabulary becomes systematic. 학교 is school, 학생 is student, 대학 is university, and the element 학 is the same in all three. Once you can see that element, a new word containing it is half known. So why does this course hold Sino-Korean back to the seventh phase? Three reasons, and they are measured rather than traditional. The elements are not visible in Hangul. A Chinese speaker sees the character and gets the element for free. You see 학 , one syllable, and there are several unrelated elements pronounced that way. So the system only pays once you can hold a large number of syllable-to-meaning correspondences, and that is a memory load, not an insight. Homophony makes early guessing dangerous. Because many Chinese elements collapse onto the same Korean syllable, a beginner who starts guessing gets it wrong often enough to build false confidence. 근 corresponds to the element for "near" and also to the one for "muscle"; 한류 is the Korean wave and also, with different characters, a cold ocean current. The course's own word lists were checked against the characters for exactly this reason. The payoff is at the top, not the bottom. The words where the system earns its keep are the abstract and technical ones you meet at C1: the vocabulary of law, science, criticism and politics. The first few hundred words you need are mostly native Korean, where the system tells you nothing. The seventh phase therefore has a volume of its own for this — six lessons that take about two hundred characters and the four hundred words built from them, at the point where the return is highest. Until then, learn Sino-Korean words as words. Dictionary order, and looking a word up Korean dictionary order follows the alphabet, which makes it far more tractable than Chinese. A word is ordered first by its initial consonant, then by its vowel, then by its final consonant, and the order within each of those is the fixed letter order you learned in lesson 0.6. Two things surprise English speakers. The first is that the double consonants come immediately after their single counterparts: the order runs ㄱ , ㄲ , ㄴ , ㄷ , ㄸ , and so on, so 까 comes after 가 and before 나 . The second is that the vowel is sorted before the final consonant, so 간 comes after 가 but before 개 — the vowel outranks the letter underneath. Order Words Why 1 가다 initial ㄱ , vowel ㅏ , no final 2 간다 same initial and vowel, final ㄴ added 3 개 same initial, later vowel ㅐ 4 까다 initial ㄲ , which follows ㄱ 5 나다 initial ㄴ The harder problem is not the order but the form. Korean verbs and adjectives appear in text conjugated, and a dictionary lists them in the dictionary form ending in 다 . You will meet 먹어요 and need to look up 먹다 ; you will meet 몰라요 and need to look up 모르다 , where the stem has changed shape a