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Topic | I am a polygot. Korean is the hardest language to learn. |
Deganawidah 06/26/19 5:46:07 PM #15: | orcus_snake posted... legendarylemur posted...orcus_snake posted...i read somwhere that korean is one of the easiest to learn becausre the people that made the language were very efficient with the structure and shit and it doesnt have billions of exceptions to the usual rules like English for example. Contemporary Korean uses Chinese characters so infrequently that you rarely have to read any, but the language can be written with them and has been written in them historically. Korean was originally written entirely in Chinese characters (called hanja in Korean, kanji in Japanese), either fully in what is called literary Chinese (basically the way Chinese was written for educated people many centuries ago) or in a system called idu which mixed Chinese characters used for meaning with some used for purely phonetic purposes to represent Korean words or grammatical particles not found in Chinese. Hangul was invented in the 15th century as a phonetic alphabet to better suit the language. As legendarylemur said, it was especially meant to be much easier to learn to read and write than Chinese characters and greatly increase literacy. At this time in Korean history, most people couldn't read very much outside the educated elite class and government bureaucrats. Even after the promulgation of hangul, the educated elite and the bureaucrats continued to write primarily in Chinese characters, seeing hangul as lower class, but hangul was used by people who had less access to formal education, especially women. It was also used more during the 1592-98 Japanese invasion of Korea because they wanted to communicate things in a form that could not be easily read by the Japanese army. Hangul gradually came into greater use over the centuries. By the early to mid twentieth century, Korean was typically written with a mixture of Chinese characters (hanja) and hangul similar to the ratio of kanji to hiragana/katana in Japanese today. By the 2000s the language had come to be written almost exclusively in hangul in most situations, though you do still see some commonly known hanja appear on signs, labels, news headlines, etc. and even more are used in books and articles to provide clarification of meaning (usually in parenthesis after the hangul word). --- "History is the road map and without it there is no way to navigate the future." - George Wunderlich ... Copied to Clipboard! |
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