Deganawidah posted...Kastrada posted...
Deganawidah posted...
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.
So how does that work for names? Like 95% of my students/coworkers/friends have hanja names. Are their names just hangul versions of hanja?
Side note: I have zero knowledge of hanja.
In most cases yes. The majority of Korean names are based on hanja and so each syllable has a hanja character associated with it. There are some people who have names not based on hanja. This is becoming more common with given names nowadays but the majority still appear to be based on hanja. You can usually ask a Korean speaker with a Korean name about the hanja for their name. Usually they will at least be able to say something about what they mean and can often write them. The hangul is basically just the phonetic writing of how the hanja is pronounced in Korean.
It's getting less common where I am from sadly. Sucks because hangul names sound so much better to me than hanja names. >_>
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