Quote:
Originally Posted by Matthew
How did you learn your Korean? Did you ever take classes or was it all by yo' bad self?
Are spoken and written Korean close? How has Jum's ELL development been affected
by the move to Korea?
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Wheel Matty,
I lived in Korea from 96'-98' and at that time I learned to read Korean (piece of cake actually...for anyone) You could self-teach yourself to read in one day (with no distractions).....one week with work/fam around, etc...
Then I started dating a young lady who couldn't speak English
nor had any intentions to learn, so my speaking rose up quickly. I've since (ten-year absence) lost alot of that speaking ability....but the reading remains.
In short, no classes...
Spoken and written Korean are fairly close as far as I know. Lizara could probably answer this question with more detail than I can, but I compare the three languages, English-Thai-Korean as something like:
English - Simple alphabet - reading is challenging (with silents, combined vowel sounds, etc..) Speaking is very difficult (with expressionisms, etc....)
Thai - Difficult alphabet - reading is very difficult. Speaking is not so difficult (basics) because of everyone using similar expressionisms (regional)
Korean - Simple alphabet - reading is cake (few silents or special rules). Speaking is very difficult (with expressionisms, etc....)
The Korean alphabet:
Korean (
한국어/
조선말, see
below) is the official
language of
North Korea and
South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the
Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in
China.
There are about 80 million Korean speakers, with large groups in
Australia,
Brazil,
Canada,
China,
Japan, the
United States,
CIS (
post-Soviet states), and more recently the
Philippines.
Much vocabulary has been borrowed from
Chinese, especially words that denote abstract ideas, in the same way European languages borrow from Latin and Greek. It was formerly written using
hanja, borrowed
Chinese characters pronounced in the Korean way. In the 15th century a national writing system was developed, nowadays called
hangul.
The genealogical
classification of the Korean language is debated. Some linguists place it in the
Altaic language family, while others consider it to be a
language isolate. It is
agglutinative in its morphology and
SOV in its
syntax.
Korean language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hangul was promulgated by the fourth king of the
Joseon Dynasty,
Sejong the Great. The
Hall of Worthies (
Jiphyeonjeon, 집현전) is often credited for the work.
The project was completed in late December 1443 or January 1444, and described in 1446 in a document titled
Hunmin Jeongeum ("The Proper Sounds for the Education of the People"), after which the alphabet itself was named. The publication date of the
Hunmin Jeong-eum, October 9, became
Hangul Day in
South Korea. Its
North Korean equivalent is on January 15.
Various speculations about the creation process were put to rest by the discovery in 1940 of the 1446
Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye. This document explains the design of the consonant letters according to
articulatory phonetics and the vowel letters according to the principles of
yin and yang and
vowel harmony.
King Sejong explained that he created the new script because the Korean language was different from Chinese; using Chinese characters (known as
hanja) to write was so difficult for the common people that only privileged aristocrats
(yangban), usually male, could read and write fluently. The majority of Koreans were effectively illiterate before the invention of Hangul.
Hangul was designed so that even a commoner could learn to read and write; the
Haerye says
"A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days."
Hangul faced opposition by the literate elite, such as
Choe Manri and other
Confucian scholars in the 1440s, who believed hanja to be the only legitimate writing system, and perhaps saw it as a threat to their status. However, it entered popular culture as Sejong had intended, being used especially by women and writers of popular fiction.
It was effective enough at disseminating information among the uneducated that
Yeonsangun, the paranoid tenth king, forbade the study or use of Hangul and banned Hangul documents in 1504, and
King Jungjong abolished the Ministry of
Eonmun (언문청 諺文廳, governmental institution related to Hangul research) in 1506.
Hangul - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
