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0 pointsekianjo5y ago0 comments

> as sinograms are used at least in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnam

While technically a true statement, the usage of kanji in Korea and Vietnam is now fairly limited - Korea uses typically a system based on combining sounds together nowadays (while you still see them use Kanji for names or titles here and there) and Vietnam has moved to (an accent-rich) alphabet during the French colonization .

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andrewzah5y ago

Korean doesn't use kanji. It uses hanja.

While Korean uses a syllabary just like English, the sino-Korean words still have the underlying hanja. If you look up those words in the dictionary, it will show the hanja. [0]

From my understanding there are several usages of hanja to this day:

- Korean names. For the most part, given names will have hanja chosen by the parents/grandparents/family. However recently it's becoming more common to have pure hangeul names, or english/foreign names, with no associated hanja.

- To disambiguate homographs/homonyms. This is common on Korean tv shows.

- To represent countries, politicians, and surnames on news articles. For example, 朴 (surname Pak/Park) and 美 (USA). Here is a random article example. [1] and a list of common hanja that pops up. [2] Side note, it's humorous to me that the hanja used for USA is also the hanja for 'beauty' (미).

- For days of the week and months, I saw hanja being used somewhat commonly.

- To guess the meaning of unknown words. If you know a certain hanja reading like 비 or 경 then it makes figuring out words a bit easier.

[0]: https://en.dict.naver.com/#/entry/koen/27ed7d6b4161442885572...

[1]: https://www.chosun.com/politics/politics_general/2021/03/25/...

[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/km01fv/short_list_o...

edit: clarified about modern Korean naming practices.

hocuspocus5y ago

> - Korean names. Unless they're into trendy foreign names, both the given name and surname will have hanja chosen.

Not necessarily true anymore. My wife has a completely made up given name that has nothing foreign: just two plain hangul characters without meaning on their own.

andrewzah5y ago

Ah right, I blanked on that.

Some of the most memorable people I ran into in Korea were named 하늘 and 보라. I also met someone with a single character name, but I can't remember which character... I think 강?

QuercusMax5y ago

English doesn't use a syllabary.

WildParser5y ago

https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/engul.htm

andrewzah5y ago

You're right, I misunderstood that term.

rational_indian5y ago

I'd say good riddance. Why saddle yourself with this abomination?

blacktriangle5y ago

Honestly, because it is crazy easy to read sinograms. I only lived in Japan for a few months and casually studied the language, but I wasn't with any other foreigners so I was 100% immersed in the language. At the end of the few months I reached the point where I could read Japanese faster than I can read English. It's as if reading a phonetic language still has to go through a process of symbol -> sound -> picture -> meaning in our brains, where a more ideographic language goes symbol -> meaning directly thus cutting out a lot of the processing time. Given that any given text is going to be read thousands of times more than it is written, the extra complexity in writing seems well worth the trade-off.

EE84M3i5y ago

What resources did you use to get so good at reading kanji so fast? A few months to be able to read all but the simplest japanese is really incredible for someone that doesn't already know kanji.

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andrewzah5y ago

Korean doesn't use kanji. It uses hanja.

While Korean uses a syllabary just like English, the sino-Korean words still have the underlying hanja. If you look up those words in the dictionary, it will show the hanja. [0]

From my understanding there are several usages of hanja to this day:

- To disambiguate homographs/homonyms. This is common on Korean tv shows.

- For days of the week and months, I saw hanja being used somewhat commonly.

- To guess the meaning of unknown words. If you know a certain hanja reading like 비 or 경 then it makes figuring out words a bit easier.

[0]: https://en.dict.naver.com/#/entry/koen/27ed7d6b4161442885572...

[1]: https://www.chosun.com/politics/politics_general/2021/03/25/...

[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/km01fv/short_list_o...

edit: clarified about modern Korean naming practices.

hocuspocus5y ago

> - Korean names. Unless they're into trendy foreign names, both the given name and surname will have hanja chosen.

Not necessarily true anymore. My wife has a completely made up given name that has nothing foreign: just two plain hangul characters without meaning on their own.

andrewzah5y ago

Ah right, I blanked on that.

Some of the most memorable people I ran into in Korea were named 하늘 and 보라. I also met someone with a single character name, but I can't remember which character... I think 강?

QuercusMax5y ago

English doesn't use a syllabary.

WildParser5y ago

https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/engul.htm

andrewzah5y ago

You're right, I misunderstood that term.

rational_indian5y ago

I'd say good riddance. Why saddle yourself with this abomination?

blacktriangle5y ago

EE84M3i5y ago

What resources did you use to get so good at reading kanji so fast? A few months to be able to read all but the simplest japanese is really incredible for someone that doesn't already know kanji.

2 more replies

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse