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Korea Returning Chinese Character

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The world of hangul studies and childhood education have collided in an unusually sharp argument over the future of hanja in schools.

The spark for this latest conflagration was the decision by the Seoul Department of Education to expand hanja education in its elementary and middle schools starting in the 2013 fall semester

On July 3rd, civic groups devoted to hangul and parents of schoolchildren gathered in front of the Department of Education’s office building in Jongro and held a press conference detailing their opposition to teaching hanja in elementary schools.

The Coalition for Hangul Culture, the Association for Hangul Studies, and other hangul organizations, New Right parent associations which typically voice their concerns about the Department of Education’s policies, conservative education groups and progressive education groups all stood side by side in presenting their position during the meeting.

South Korean elementary schools had been using hangul-only textbooks for the past forty years, however the hanja expansion policy introduced by Moon Yong-rin, Chairman of the Seoul Department of Education, would have marked a change back toward hanja-based education. This fundamental change lead to the unusually unified opposition showing on July 3rd.

Starting in the fall, the Seoul Department of Education will implement a policy that encourages city elementary and middle schools to use textbooks that prioritize learning hanja terminology. The department is currently looking at the demands of teaching hanja and parents’ concerns in regards to hanja education.

Hangul advocates and a number of education civic groups have branded the policy “a return to the past.”

According to critics, “Chairman Moon is advocating for the cause of teaching hanja in school because he believes that it is difficult to understand the words in the textbooks, but he is doing so based solely on his personal feelings rather than any objective evidence.”

The opposition claims that the students have a hard time understanding the hanja-based terms in their textbooks, but that it also takes too long to teach them the characters. They say that if such is the case, it would be better to replace the difficult words with more native Korean words rather than trying to teach the hanja.

Opposition groups also suggested that the hanja education policy will place an additional burden on students, thereby pushing them to rely more on private education and tutors.

The Seoul Department of Education has responded by saying that the opposition is overreacting, since the hanja classes will be optional and taught after school hours. The classes are also intended only to improve knowledge of Korean words.

During an internal meeting last month, Chairman Moon stated that “the hanja expansion policy is intended to increase understanding of Korean, not to undermine the hangul-only education approach…make sure that there are no misunderstandings.”

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The above was machine translated from Yonhap news.
 
Recently, South Korea proposed that China, South Korea and Japan together share 800 common Chinese characters.

Japan media reposted the news


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I am sorry, for those of us who don't know, what is 'hangul' and 'hanja'?

Hanja is the Korean way of saying "Han characters".

In Chinese it is pronounced Hanzi, in Japanese it is pronounced Kanji, in Korean it is pronounced Hanja. It's the same word, just pronounced differently.

East Asia traditionally used Han characters in their writing system, Japanese still do, while others like Vietnam moved to a Latin character based writing system.

Hangul is a Korean designed alphabet system, designed to allow them to avoid dependence on using Han characters.
 
@Lux de Veritas - Dude is the medium of instruction in English in Singaporean Schools throughout ? :what:

I ask this because when I visited Singapore a while ago - Not all Malays & Chinese were very fluent in English !
 
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@Lux de Veritas - Dude is the medium of instruction in English in Singaporean Schools throughout ? :what:

I ask this because when I visited Singapore a while ago - Not all Malays & Chinese were very fluent in English !

I believe English, Mandarin and Malay are all official languages in Singapore.

Though I think most Singaporeans are of Hokkien descent (originally from Fujian province in China), and so a lot of them speak Hokkien at home.

Mandarin was chosen as the official Chinese dialect, to be fair to all the different Chinese subgroups there.
 
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I believe English, Mandarin and Malay are all official languages in Singapore.

Though I think most Singaporeans are of Hokkien descent (originally from Fujian province), and so a lot of them speak Hokkien at home.

Yes, I do think you're right about that because most sign boards were in all three languages.

I was merely curious that whereas I came across many Chinese & Malays in Singapore who were fluent in English & yet many others that weren't - I wondered why was this the case ?

I noticed that most Chinese were conversing with each other in, what I presume, was the Chinese Language (perhaps Mandarin or something else) & the Malays were conversing with each other in Malay & so on & so forth with the Indians in their own language but I had somehow formed this erroneous opinion in my mind that Singapore would be like the New Zealand or Australia or some other country from the English-Speaking World but with its distinct Oriental Touch owing to English being the medium of instruction there & being the lingua franca (common tongue) between the 3 races that inhabit that country !

The Oriental touch was very much there though perhaps diluted by over commercialization but the command over the English Language amongst the local populace, though admirable, wasn't what I had imagined it to be.

Not that I'm saying thats bad or anything - God knows very few people know English in my own country ! Its just that I was somewhat surprised.
 
If one Korean or Japanese know little Chinese characters, he even can't understand well their own languages, since Korea words and Japan words are based on Characters.

Words of Places of historic interest in Korea ,Japan and Vietnamare all in Chinese characters and same as their ancient Books,
Vietnam temple with Chinese characters
201062163529267.jpg


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South Korea‘s country door
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Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs
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Yes, I do think you're right about that because most sign boards were in all three languages.

I was merely curious that whereas I came across many Chinese & Malays in Singapore who were fluent in English & yet many others that weren't - I wondered why was this the case ?

I noticed that most Chinese were conversing with each other in, what I presume, was the Chinese Language (perhaps Mandarin or something else) & the Malays were conversing with each other in Malay & so on & so forth with the Indians in their own language but I had somehow formed this erroneous opinion in my mind that Singapore would be like the New Zealand or Australia or some other country from the English-Speaking World but with its distinct Oriental Touch owing to English being the medium of instruction there & being the lingua franca (common tongue) between the 3 races that inhabit that country !

The Oriental touch was very much there though perhaps diluted by over commercialization but the command over the English Language amongst the local populace, though admirable, wasn't what I had imagined it to be.

Not that I'm saying thats bad or anything - God knows very few people know English in my own country ! Its just that I was somewhat surprised.

Well, I guess it depends on the person in particular. :)

In my experience, the Singaporeans I have met were decent to good in both English and Mandarin.

Though they will be most fluent in their mother tongue. For the Chinese majority it will be some form of Hokkien Chinese (or another Chinese dialect), and for Malays it will be Malay.

Singapore's standard of English is much higher than it is in Hong Kong anyway. The only reason my English is decent, is because I went to an International School in Mid Levels, most others will have very limited English speaking abilities. Since they simply don't need it.
 
The problem with pure Korean alphabets (Hangul) is that Korean language is largely based on loan words from Chinese, so you get lots of lots of homophones that readers have to guess from contexts. Chinese is just not phonetic language, and pronunciation is not what unifies various Chinese dialects. Even now, Korean newspapers etc have to use parenthesis to indicate what Chinese words some complex terms are referring to.

I have quite a few Korean friends. I can even communicate with my Korean friends by writing to each other on piece of paper:P Sometimes pronunciations are very similar to my dialect. Korean names are pretty much based on Chinese characters so they have to know some Chinese characters in order to know their own names, which I believe stille hold true with respect to Vietnamese names, but I think most Vietnamese don't even know what their names mean.
 
Hanja is the Korean way of saying "Han characters".

In Chinese it is pronounced Hanzi, in Japanese it is pronounced Kanji, in Korean it is pronounced Hanja. It's the same word, just pronounced differently.

East Asia traditionally used Han characters in their writing system, Japanese still do, while others like Vietnam moved to a Latin character based writing system.

Hangul is a Korean designed alphabet system, designed to allow them to avoid dependence on using Han characters.

Haha it's very similar in Turkish. Hanja (Hanca in Turkish) means the "language of Hans". We tend to consider ourselves Europeans but we have a considerable amount of mutual culture with Asians as well. However the effect from the ME made some distortions in Anatolian culture. Actually it was much more like a hybrid between far east and the west.
 
Hanja is a must for written names,otherwise Koreans won't be able to tell one from another。

Hanja is also a must for legal terminology,which requires strict and exclusive interpretation。

Most,if not all,Korean historical documents were written in Hanja。

Hanja is still for the learned and the cultured in Korea to this today。
 

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