Chinese characters in Korea now know how Latin feels in the West. Many college freshmen can not write their own names in hanja, most cannot write their parents’ names, and some mistake “bamboo mat” for “university.” The Chosun laments:
Our students do not learn Chinese characters while in school. They have almost completely disappeared from literature textbooks. Only a few schools still teach Chinese characters and usually due to the passion of the school principals. High school students can take Chinese characters as an elective course in their junior or senior year, but hardly any of them sign up for it in scholastic aptitude tests.
Being able to write Chinese characters is one thing; understanding their meaning is another. I get the sense that most native Korean speakers have an intuitive grasp of hanja derivations, even if they can’t draw (or even read) the relevant ideograms. Similarly, English speakers will sense that “dictionary” and “dictate” stem from the same Latin root, even if they can’t conjugate dico, dicere.
That said, I’m all in favor of classical language education. Seventy percent of Korean vocabulary derives from Chinese, and sixty percent of English from Latin and Greek. Any Westerner studying Korean can no doubt relate to the frustration of watching Chinese and Japanese classmates easily digest difficult vocabulary simply because they know the root words. Which suggests that Korean college students aren’t the only ones who might benefit from a little less soju and a little more hanja.
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How many native English speakers know that if a Roman talked about meeting this exuberant young lady, he wasn’t talking about her personality.
Or than that a comic’s routine, particularly one done by a male, would have never been described as hysterical.
My father has been lamenting the deterioration of the state of the han mun in Korean education for years now. This is nothing new.
He has remarked that American Black NBA stars and white teenagers seem more enthusiatic about Chinese characters (so much so that they are willing to have it permanently marked on their persons) than the average Korean students.
Your father’s sardonic comment reminds me of what my own dad said about declining Hanja education in Korea.
He said that that without Hanja, written Korean (just Hangul alone) is practically an “idiot’s language”.
He has also bemoaned the elimination of Hanja from mandatory education and the concomitant decline of the written language vis-a-vis the disappearance of Hanja from Korean newspapers and magazines, especially over the past 20 years. My father has said many times that the Korean government’s elimination of Hanja from the schools and public usage is the single greatest contributing factor to higher depression and suicide rates in Korea.
I happen to believe that this is true as so few Koreans that I’ve met seem to take any real enjoyment out of reading. Yes, they’ll memorize a TOEIC test prep book to get a higher score, or flip through a comic book at an amazingly quick pace to kill time, but ask ‘em what they just read, and what, if any meaning it has to them. Invariably they’ll say, “I don’t know,” or “it has no meaning” — it’s just killing time to them.
Anyway, I believe that by removing the only analytical component in written Korean — Hanja — you effectively have a written language that can be alienating and dissatisfying to anyone who’s not in the “in group”, i.e., those who haven’t been exposed to or learned the esoteric vocabulary or technical terms inherent to the subject matter.
I also think that Hanja education and popular usage develops important analytical and critical thinking skills, which are strikingly absent from younger generations, but are in abundance with much older generations, especially those born before the Korean War.
Back then, I believe the average Korean high school student had to learn somewhere between 700-1000 characters just to be able to read the newspapers.
Now, I think the average Korean college student knows somehwere in the neighborhood of 50-100 characters.
Check out http://www.hanzismatter.com/ before you go tattooing up with Chinese script!
I too trace my depression to Western society’s inability to think and express itself in Linear B. The revival of Latin as a palliative might help, but the West can’t bring itself to do even this. We are in the same boat as our Korean friends.
I strongly believe that Hanja functions negatively in social progress. Regardless of its practical benefits, if any such does exist, the fact is that it’s hard to learn. In the past, Hanja acted as a means to segregation between the commoners and the literati, limiting social mobility and the possible rise of democracy and capitalism.
I believe that we should write in a script that most people can understand. Written script is not for someone to feel “elite”, or to “enjoy” reading as H. Kim suggests. It’s meant for communication. If newspapers are fraught with Hanja, this will only alienate the less educated from dissemination of information, and if academic journals are fraught with Hanja, which is still the case unfortunately, this will only marginalize less-learned entrepreneurs from the latest reserach relevant to their enterprise.
When King Sejong the Great invented Hangul, the elite literati rose against this great Korean heritage, that it’s a “barbaric language”. Ironic that again, with what I believe is the same social mechanism at work, Hangul would be called the “idiot’s language”. If anything, I find such sentiment deplorable, as deplorable as the elite literatis of Chosun who brought Korea to absolute ruin and humiliation.
Hanja is an impediment to social progress. Let it fade away from the Korean collectivity.
The reason you give for yangban rejecting hangul is true. But…
“It’s hard to learn.” I smell mediocrity whining.
Welcome to the 21st century – no more exams of Confucian classics.
Some might say higher math is hard to learn, too.
North Korea has done away with hanja for decades and is getting along fi… oops!
It all comes down to this: Is there a need for Hanja?
As I’ve stated before, languages, written and spoken, are adapted to the needs of its speakers. The only languages that don’t evolve are dead language.
H. Kim is absolutely right about one thing: Something about Korean culture sucks all the joy out of reading. I, too, can scarcely remember the last time I saw any Korean reading for pleasure. So we have the odd juxtaposition of a nearly 100% literacy rate, but shockingly low take-up of newspapers and virtually nothing spent on books and magazines. An average family spends just W10,000 a month (between 3.5 people) on all printed media — books, magazines, and newspapers. Everyone knows how to read, there is lots of “studying”, but no reading. I have to wonder if that is because there’s so much grimly-forced reading in the mind-numbing acquisition of “facts” which passes for learning here.
As someone who learned Japanese and Chinese before ever approaching Korean, the value of hanja seems obvious. Over half the words in Korean are Chinese loanwords and thus ideographically based. Knocking hanja seems to be particularly popular among kyopo, who may have been raised without the benefit of hanja instruction in the higher grades. However, in spite of their rapid decrease in popular society, one can harly argue that they have disappeared. They are still being used and if you want to read many older books you have to know them. Thus, in order to be fully literate in Korea you still need a knowledge of hanja and having that knowledge will only enhances your knowledge of the Korean language itself. It also becomes a bridge to understanding both China and Japan. Therefore, I am in favor of continuing to teach them, even if most Koreans never write them enough to master them (we have to differentiate between passive reading knowledge and active writing ability). Yes, it is a formidable taks, but it offers rich rewards.
Note that even in Japan young people are seen as seriously deficient in kanji writing ability. Email and cellphone texting are usually blamed. But everyone in Japan can read them. The Chinese put Japanese to shame though. A Chinese 3rd grader has learned over 1000 characters where a Japanese 3rd grader has had only 480. Koreans don’t get serious until jr. high and hardly get enough writing practice to master them.
Sorry for a few typos above. I myself have trouble typing even my own language and reading this tiny text. Where is my writing brush?
Often when I ask my wife the meaning of a Korean word without supplying the context she will reply that she can’t say without looking at the hanja. English speakers, though, don’t often (i.e., never) say that they that have to check, the greek, latin, old norse or middle french. That may be because there are not so many aural synonyms in English that could only be distinguished out of context on the basis of the written artifacts of their etymological roots. In any event, I suspect that the answer to the problem of the lack of critical thinking in Korea isn’t in a return to a writing system that, in both its Chinese original and even more so in the Korean adaptation, lends itself to imprecision and obscurantism. Instead what seems to be needed is training in thinking and the reduction of those social mores that devalue critical thought in deference to groupthink. Take even a moderately curious individual out of the typical Korean govt or corporate setting, give them a little priming and some scope and they do pretty well.
These days Korean grade school children now seem to know more Chinese characters than many Korean college students since it again seems popular for young children to study hanja, which probably has something to do with the popularity of the hanja proficiency test. It seems Korea has become a society enslaved by tests and test preparation. In other words, it there is no test for something, no one seems to bother studying it.
There is one big problem with comparing the lack of Chinese character education in Korea with the lack of Latin education in the West, and that is the fact that Chinese is not a dead language. The countries to both the east and west of Korea use Chinese characters, and Chinese characters are still used in Korean books and documents and on Korean signs and historical markers. Will ignorance of Chinese characters seem cute to a Chinese or Japanese businessman who gives a Korean businessman a business card without Korean or English translations?
One thing that bothers me about Korean college students, at least in some of the schools I have taught at recently, is that they sometimes feel compelled to feign ignorance of a subject for fear of being excluded from a group. For example, last year a student secretly tell me that he had passed the second-level Chinese character proficiency test, but he asked me not to mention it to any of classmates for fear that they might think him strange or something. At the time, the other students seemed to be struggling in a basic Chinese character class, which our school required. I remember students worrying about being thought the class nerd back when I was in high school, but I do not remember noticing it in college, which is one reason why college students in Korea reminds me of high school students back in the US.
Last year while checking my students for English cheat notes prior to a midterm exam, I found one student with Chinese character cheat notes that included some of the most basic characters. After I confiscated his notes, he came to me after class and asked if he could have them back because his Chinese character exam was the next hour. He did not seem to understand why I should worry about his cheating on the Chinese character exam since it was not my class.
Koreans do know how to read, but do they understand it? A few years ago Korea finished last among OECD countries in a survey on reading comprehension of official and technical texts. The link to the original article that I had in my own blog note seems to be dead, so I’ll only have to quote myself on that:
The writing has been hangulized, but so much of important terminology in the language remains sinitized (based on Chinese characters) that such poor results are no wonder when hanja is not known. Sure I could make out, for example, the meaning of jeong in the info leaflet of a flu medicine from the context when in Korea last time, but the use of that term instead of al to mean “pill” in such texts shows what’s wrong. And there’s also the thinking that “hangul” as writing equals “Korean” as language.
Over the last few years I have been interested in the impact that the abolition or reduction of Hanja education had on Koreans, Korean society and Korean intellectual life. I think a de facto elimination of Hanja in Korea is one of the most interesting social experiment, along with Vietnam’s case. For better or for worse, Hanja had always served as a basis for Korean intellectual life and cultural activities for thousands of years.
I have absolutely no interest in the propaganda of both Hangul supremacists and Hanja revivalists. I’m curious to know exactly what actually is happening in Korea. The opinions attracted my attention are as follows.
1. It brought a reduced burden of learning Korean on students or foreigners.
2. It brought a reduction of various social costs associated with using Hanja.
3. It caused a drastic decline in the population of reading (but it’s difficult of rigorous proof).
4. It caused a major loss of highly abstract vocabulary and technical terms of Chinese or Japanese origin.
5. As a result, Koreans lost a considerable number of their significant tools to be able to think complex things logically and profoundly in their native language.
6. Grammatical Change: According to some researchers, the percentage of the passive voice used in writings by Koreans has been decreasing over the past 30 years. Today’s Korean writing/speaking have a higher active-voice-to-passive-voice ratio than many other languages.
Other than the views previously mentioned, I’ve heard different opinions about the effects of the abolition/reduction of Hanja edcation on Korean society, but I’ve hardly seen comments of non-Korean (and non-Japanese) people. I’m really curious about their opinions.
So can anyone fill us in on how the Vietnamese and North Koreans have fared without Chinese characters?
I don’t quite get how Hangul alone can’t hack it. How can English express anything with just 26 characters? What am I missing?
I don’t quite get how Hangul alone can’t hack it.
For the most it can, but when the language written in Hangul is not “Korean” enough, problems apparently arise: the Korean pronunciation only of literary expressions based on Chinese characters can’t convey enough meaning. The word jusa has eight entries in the dictionary I use, twenty-two in the online Standard Dictionary of Korean Language.
And don’t the Vietnamese mark the tones in their writing, greatly adding to the info that the Latin characters contain?
I agree with gbevers that it seems young children are doing more with hanja than college age students, and that the hanja proficency test may have a lot to do with it.
I strongly disagree with Antti if he means to imply that the potential confusion that can come with having several hanja-based words that are the same pronunciation has much if anything to do with the problem described in the OECD article.
To begin with, there is no reason to believe that native speakers of Korean are having a harder time gaining information from the things they read in their daily lives (and I’m talking about the OECD study) than they used to when hanja was common in South Korea.
IMHO the problem is a fundamental inability to write in a reader-oriented fashion and to think of how to write a good sentence. The state of the Korean sentence today is very poor, and every time I bring up the subject (one of my favorite) with other specialists in Korean language (at NAKL & elsewhere) they tend to agree.
Spend any day reading a newspaper or walking around a major city and you will find examples of things that could have or should have been written better.
If your native language is anything other than Korean, ask yourself how many times you have opened a newspaper in your language and read something that just didn’t make any sense gramatically? This is something that happens in Korea very, very often.
Take, for example, a recent column in the Hankyoreh by former Uni minister Lee Jong-seok.
http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/pol.....89258.html
Try to make sense of the second sentence in the following quote:
한국 정부는 이번 6자 회담이 일정한 진전을 본다면 지체없이 남북관계를 전면적으로 복원할 필요가 있다고 본다. 북핵 실험이라는 극한적 국면에서는 상황 반전을 위해 남북관계의 운용에도 제약이 따르지만 그것은 어디까지나 잠정적이며 예외적이다. 기본적으로 핵문제와 남북관계의 진전이 서로 긍정적인 영향을 주는 선순환구조가 이루어질 때 한반도 정세가 안정되며, 우리의 외교역량도 비약적으로 제고된다.
That’s just poor writing, any way you look at it. Don’t feel bad about not being able to figure it out, either, because you’re not alone. See here:
http://djuna.cine21.com/bbs/vi.....8;no=60031
There you have it, Korean netizens trying to make sense of this sentence: “북핵 실험이라는 극한적 국면에서는 상황 반전을 위해 남북관계의 운용에도 제약이 따르지만 그것은 어디까지나 잠정적이며 예외적이다.” It just can’t be done. You get a certain “feeling” about what he may have meant to say, but you can’t say for sure. The only reason netizens are talking about it is because it was by Lee Jong-seok, so if it had been a sentence in a letter from your local gucheong or such, it probably wouldn’t have been in public discussion.
I run into sentences like this several times a week. Remember that newspapers are proofread more than most other material and contemplate what that must mean for written Korean in other contexts (on the other hand personal correspondence, however poorly written, does not have the same problem because the two parties corresponding know a lot about each other and what is being discussed).
This is all just poor writing, period. There are many reasons for the general lack of ability to write a good sentence but I won’t discuss those here. At any rate, my point is that the inability of the Korean public to understand much of what it reads in the course of everyday life is a problem with sentence composition and the lack of an ability to write text that is not highly context dependent. It has nothing to do with hanja or hanja education. You could find very brief examples where using hanja could have helped with a single word, but there just isn’t any evidence that suggests the problem with written communication in Korean is because hanja isn’t used or because people don’t know enough hanja.
North Korea does not teach hanja and does not use it, yet writing from North Korea is usually much better than what we see in the South. I have found this to be the case and many NK watchers agree as well, as does, for that matter, any SKorean I know who has read material from the North.
For the record, I support hanja education and am pleased my 6 year old likes to learn it. But the argument by many proponents of better hanja education that the lack of the use and knowledge of hanja contributes to the lack of clarity in (South) Korean writing makes me wonder how well those proponents write themselves.
Interesting view, oranckay. In this narrow case, I wonder if it would have been possible — politically and in terms of face — for some desker to edit the prose of a former minister. We constantly hear accounts of copy polishers in English, for companies or for media, in Korea having their improvements reversed to spare the author embarassment.
This has been a delightful thread.
I particularly liked Oranckay’s comments on sentence composition.
You might want to compare Winston Churchill’s recollections in “A Roving Commission.” Upon flunking his Latin and Greek classes at Harrow, he was consigned to a remedial English class in which he was fortunate to meet a good teacher who stressed the analysis of sentences.
“Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence — which is a noble thing. And when in after years my schoolfellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage.”
Slim -
I know what you mean, but even so, the sentence above is not impossible to understand for a lack of clarity as to the meaning of the individual words, something that, according to some, might be helped if hanja was used. Remember that using hanja or hanja-based words is a matter of vocabulary and not sentence structure. I mean, getting important men to write their more impossible sentences in hanja would not help the problem.
I do think the Hankyoreh would have been able to ask Lee for clarity if someone noticed, but I wonder whether anyone noticed, cared, etc.
Usually when it is hard to question a man of authority about his sentences it is a man of authority _within your organization_. That is, your professor or a senior writer in a newspaper you hope to work for until you retire.
When I worked at the Chosun Ilbo translating editorials I got editorials revised on 17 occasions, and I mean even after the first edition. I would go an ask the writers what they meant, and they would feel embarassed but admit their mistakes and order changes themselves. It was widely believed I was able to do this because (1) I had “need to know” since I was translating and (2) I openly said I wouldn’t be there for more than a few years and was never hoping for promotion, etc.
I think another problem is just the “authority” that is inherent in writing in Korea. In the old days only men who had authority wrote in the first place, and most “literature” (the definition of which always changes) was about learning and Confucian self-cultivation and thus is all about Wisdom. One result is that there is a habit of blaming the reader and not the writer if the reader cannot understand. It is not the writers who do this, either. The reverence bestowed upon the written word leads readers to blame themselves.
Note that in the second link above, where a netizen asks for help in understanding that horrid sentence, s/he asks for help for not understanding it - and does not criticize or pass judgment. S/he is just trying to not miss the point Lee attempted to make, somehow believing that is still possible. The responses are mostly guesses.
I’m happy to stand corrected here. I have formed my hunch of the issue from the few comments I remember reading about the OECD survey (and also from my wife’s comments about seeing Korean-language official formulae after living 20 years away from Korea).
Thanks, oranckay. I didn’t mean to suggest that hanja would help there.
There is an all-too-human tendency to think that complexity equals brilliance that may be at work here. Maybe you should translate Strunk & White into hanja-free Korean.
English is full of homophones and homonyms, yet most of us commenters here can comprehend complex texts. Koreans don’t need to learn how to read and write characters, but they do need to learn roots and word formation.
Anti wrote:
“I’m happy to stand corrected here. I have formed my hunch of the issue from the few comments I remember reading about the OECD survey (and also from my wife’s comments about seeing Korean-language official formulae after living 20 years away from Korea”
I clicked on the link and read the example of your native Korean wife finding Finnish technical writing easier to comprehend than Korean text. As Oranckay has pointed out, the problem may lie with poor writing.
I did some googling and found that South Korean school children scored just behind Finnish students in an OECD survey on literacy: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t.....400147.ece
In another survey on adult literacy, it was noted that younger Swiss had higher literacy than middle-aged Swiss. The difference was atributed to a “use it or lose it” decline in reading skills due to lack of regular reading of complex material.
I suspect if Korean students are not proficient readers, it’s not because they aren’t memorizing thousands of characters; rather, it is owing to inconsistent modeling of good writing and a lack of lifelong appreciation of reading for enjoyment.
I was sure Antti wasn’t thinking the nonuse of hanja was the source of the problem.
Slim said, “all-too-human tendency to think that complexity equals brilliance that may be at work here…”
I thinkt that’s a key part of the problem, too. When I talk to non-specialists (people who aren’t writers or language scholars in Korea) about this ( i try not talking about it if I can help myself) most people will call such poor sentences “difficult.” Regular members of the Korean public often fail to even try to differentiate between that which is hard to understand because it was poorly written and that which is hard to understand because the subject matter is difficult and the thoughts complex. There IS such a thing as Korean that is well written but hard to understand and it feels very good to read and you can tell the author worked hard at conveying his thoughts with exacting precision. Maybe I’ll quote an example if I can find.
As for something like Strunk & White. There is PLENTY of that in Korea these days. The problem is that the public doesn’t recognize there’s a problem, as evidenced in the fact pro-hanja edu types can make people think hanja is the problem and in the fact readers of Lee’s piece aren’t on his case.
Antti, your link works now.
Anyhow, this topic confuses me a bit, because I was under the misimpression that hanja education was compulsory. Wasn’t it so at one point? I understand that Park Chung-hee (or his government) did away with it altogether, and then reinstated it in 1973, with the 1800 Basic Hanja for educational use. Everyone in my wife’s family seems to know the basic hanja (except for my sister-in-law, who missed some critical chunk of it because of the temporary ban), and I’m assuming it’s not necessarily out of choice. Did it simply transition to being an optional subject at some point in the last 10 or 20 years?
G.Bevers wrote:
“There is one big problem with comparing the lack of Chinese character education in Korea with the lack of Latin education in the West, and that is the fact that Chinese is not a dead language. The countries to both the east and west of Korea use Chinese characters, and Chinese characters are still used in Korean books and documents and on Korean signs and historical markers. Will ignorance of Chinese characters seem cute to a Chinese or Japanese businessman who gives a Korean businessman a business card without Korean or English translations?”
If the Korean does not speak Chinese or Japanese, they won’t be able to pronounce the person’s name correctly anyway. Communication in China and Japan requires oral proficiency as well as a reading knowledge of Chinese characters. Koreans and Japanese do have an enormous advantage over Westerners in learning Chinese since they are able to read and write Chinese characters from Lesson One.
To answer my question (#28), hanja education and use of hanja in textbooks was abolished in 1970, and restored in 1972. Regarding whether it was ever a compulsory subject, the answer seems to be provided in a Park Noja article from last year, here. Quoting from the second-last paragraph:
“결국 학교에서 일본어가 제2외국어로 등장한 1972~73년부터 필수과목으로서의 한문교과가 국어과목에서 독립되어 신설됐다. ‘국적이 있는 교육’에 대한 열이 식어 한문이 영어 등에 밀려 선택과목이 된 것은 1990년대 초반이지만,…”
And my hopefully not hopeless translation:
Finally in school, from 1972-73 when Japanese appeared as the 2nd foreign language, Hanmun was established as a compulsory subject, independent from Korean. The enthusiasm for “citizen education” wore off, and Hanmun was pushed aside by English and other subjects, and became an elective subject in the early 1990s….
not sure if Han Mun is compulsory now, but it was in the 1990. The beauty of it though was, you didn’t have to learn it in elementary school. Perhaps days of the week and numbers, but not much else. Then in middle school, 7th grade, they throw you with Han Moon to memorize and at the same time English to memorize. My mother is the casualty of the 70s experiment. She is deficient in Han Moon while my father is quite proficient.
The funny thing is by becoming not compulsory, chinese characters are gaining popularity.
Or maybe I should just say more kids are going around to learn the characters.
since Han-ja is no longer compulsory in many schools, the universities seem to be giving additional merits to those with the Han-ja certificates.
so naturally kids now goto, or rather parents send their kids to Han-ja institutes to learn Han-ja.
btw I must say that in the high schools in countrysides, they are still teaching Han-ja(in some cases they ask for the students to pass certain level of the proficiency test).
again it is to get the kids in a better university.
I myself was taught Han-ja in highschool(around 4000 characters I beleive), but cant really read or write more than perhaps a few hundred.
The following list is a brief time-line of Hanja Education in Korea. Please tell me if there is any mistake.
1948
The Law concerning Exclusive Use of Hangul was enacted, but this law contained no provisions regarding punishments for violations.
1964-1969
Hanja education was significantly reduced in school.
1970
Hanja education was totally abolished by the Park Jeong-hee regime.
1972
Hanmun (漢文) education was restored as an elective subject in junior high school and high school, but Hanja education at the elementary school level was still not allowed.
2005
Fundamental Law of the National Language was established. Under this law, the use of Chinese characters in government documents was banned in principle.
Currently, Hanja education is allowed in elementary school at the discretion of the principal. Therefore, the school has no Hanja class if the principal feels apathy toward Hanja education.
—————
This thread provided me with useful information, especially oranckay and H.Kim ones.
The real question is whether the abolition of Hanja will help Korean society and culture over the long haul. In view of the Vietnamese precedent, it may cause a deep-rooted issue that defies any simple solution.