I don’t agree that it’s tricky. I find that after a couple months of studying, if you’re atttentive, then the pronunciation is straight forward. I personally think the pronunciation is an easier aspect of the language.The pronunciation in English is 2x harder from my point of view than Korean. Korean doesn’t have as many “foreign words’ *(which still use Korean pronunciation, mind you”). In English, everyday they adapt new words with foreign pronunciations (even though we may pronounce them wrong).
The only hard part that I’ve found about Korean, as a native English speaker, is getting used to the grammar.
Superior languages do not exist. Languages which are easier to learn, however, do exist. English may be one of those, but it’s hard to master. Rarely have I heard a foreigner try to discuss a topic without making a mistake either in 1.) vocabulary (meaning), or 2.) grammatical.
Sure Korean may be able to express more “accurately” than English, but a lot of languages have certain words which English does not have.
I think people take languages too seriously. The patterns and sounds developed from linguistic evolution… essentially… randomly. At the end of the day they all do the same thing. Here is a great clip showing the richness of cantonese vocabulary… does that make it superior? Amazing Cantonese Verbs 廣東話動詞 - YouTube
“The Korean language’s method of making sound through a combination of vowels and consonants is very scientific and economical, even.” ‘Korean language scientifically superior’
It goes without saying that languages were created by neither scientists nor “economists”. Comparing different languages is like comparing apples and oranges. Reasonable linguists would never conclude that a certain language is “scientifically” superior to the others.
I am interested in the issue of “hanja use” in the “most superior” language of the world. Is professor Sohn Ho-min against the hanja use in the Korean language?
“Opinion surveys in South Korea regarding the issue of hanja use have had mixed responses in the past. Hanja terms are also expressed through hangul, the standard script in the Korean language. Hanja use within general Korean literature has declined significantly since the 1980s because formal hanja education in South Korea does not begin until the seventh year of schooling, due to changes in government policy during the time. In 1956, one study found mixed-script Korean text (in which Sino-Korean nouns are written using hanja, and other words using hangul) were read faster than texts written purely in hangul; however, by 1977, the situation had reversed.[16] In 1988, 80% of one sample of people without a college education “evinced no reading comprehension of any but the simplest, most common hanja” when reading mixed-script passages.[17]”–Wikipedia
Yea, check out these japanese students who get stumped with really tough english questions like “how are you?”. My friend is living in korea has said it is really difficult finding people who can communicate in english to him. Canada has similar results with their french students. years of study in school… can’t speak a lick.
The characters only pose a real problem if you are endeavoring to learn how to write out everything you can say by hand. In this day and age it’s enough for most learners to be able to recognize characters and type them using phonetic spelling.
Interestingly, I’ve challenged two native speakers recently to write the word for “sneeze” by hand. They were unable to write the last character, as many natives are. But they can recognize it and type it.
It is troublesome that the characters can’t be sounded out like an alphabet, but recognizing them is just a matter of repetition and reading. Not a huge problem, with experience.
It is true about the idioms, but that also depends on how “nerdy” your conversation partners are. Some may take it overboard, but most don’t seem to. And it’s only a problem in situations where you can’t ask the speaker or someone else what it means.
But even then, it usually doesn’t get in the way of understanding what someone is saying from context and further expansion. Often an idiom will just be thrown in there to sum up an idea they’ve just shared.
Who knows what Sohn Ho Min thinks about using hanja in Korean?
Whether to use hanja in common texts and daily life has always been a controversial subject in Korea. There have always been opposing sides to this issue, but it appears that the no-hanja camp has won out.
Less and less newspapers and publications seem to use hanja nowadays, and those that do usually put them in parentheses after the Korean words, treating them like secondary information. Most internet documents are in Korean only, and the rise of the smartphones with cramped keypads might help accelerate this trend(although new breakthroughs could reverse it too).
It doesn’t mean that hanja is dead, though, since the learned people still try and master it, The current generation of journalists, law professionals, academics and the like are still quite well versed in hanja. And savvy parents send their kids to private hanja tutoring believing in its utility. With all this combined with more students studying in China nowadays, I think hanja will continue to maintain its importance at least for the time being.
In addition, modern technology and business seem to give us more reasons to learn hanja. For one, learning and using hanja has become a lot easier than before thanks to the proliferation of online tools. And as importantly, there’s the increased interaction with China and Japan, which makes hanja so much more useful.
It’s hard for anyone to know what will happen in the long run, but most people, including myself, feel that getting rid of hanja altogether will have a significantly bad effect on the language.
Here is a quote from a korean expat about learning the language without the kanji:
“I thought it would be easier and less effort to learn than Japanese which I had studied at a previous university. For the record, I was very, very wrong. I am yearning for the days when I could use kanji to differentiate between homophones.”
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I am glad that Japanese has Kanji.