Let's Learn Korean - Learn Hanja the Fun Way

Total words: 253

Reading a post on The Miseducation of Si-jo a while back, I came across a book with a title that caught my eye: Learn Hanja the Fun Way.

I picked up the book about a month ago at 교보 in 강남, and it’s now taken first place as the most useable Korean/Hanja book I’ve ever had. I love the fact that it doesn’t treat me like an absolute idiot that couldn’t spend the hour it took to learn 한글, so there’s not a bit of romanization (thank GOD~!!). The biggest thing that drives me crazy about Korean study books is the mind-numbing romanziations I have to sift through (how do you say pet-peeve in Korean?). Anyway, this book requires a decent level of Korean language ability to complete the exercises , basically paragraphs written in both 한글 and 한자. I’ve found that there are only about 5 or 6 words or constructions in each paragraph that I don’t already know well, so I just mark those and figure them out easily through the translation (that I cover while I’m reading the 한글/한자 version). It makes for a really good review of the 한글 I know, and the feeling of satisfaction I get from understanding a paragraph written in two different countries’ characters (which a year and a half ago, I didn’t know a bit of) is amazing.

Learn Hanja the Fun Way: 12,600원
Pink highlighter to mark the words I don’t understand: 300원
Understanding a paragraph written in mixed 한글 and 한자: priceless

Posted by ㄴㅇㄷㅇ ㅠㅇㅜㅌ on Tuesday Apr 5, 2005 in Books Hanja 한자 | |

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Learn Hanja the Fun Way: 12,600원
Pink highlighter to mark the words I don’t understand: 300원
Understanding a paragraph written in mixed 한글 and 한자: priceless
Do they have those ads over there!?

I’m glad to know that there are accessible texts on 한자 written in English. I had one similar to yours, but it was written back in the 60s (?) by Fred Lukoff, who as I recall was a professor at Yonsei for a while.

If you get bitten by the bug and ever want to dive further into 한자, here are some comments and suggestions:

First of all, if you ever consider investing in an 옥편 (玉篇; 한자 dictionary), choose one that: (a) gives English meanings for the characters (most do); and (b) has a long list of sample words for each character. Many will only give, say, three representative words for each Hanja, so you come away not realizing that the same character is used in 5 or 10 words that you are already familiar with (which, if you did realize it, would help you to further understand the character’s meaning).

There is only one 옥편 widely available that is written in English to my knowledge, and that is Bruce K. Grant’s 30-year-old Hollym book A Guide to Korean Characters (which 교보 will almost certainly have; you can find more information on it here).

Actually, for the purpose of expanding your vocabulary of 한자어 (words formed from 한자)—and also native Korean words—the best book (in English) is probably Handbook of Korean Vocabulary, which gives long lists of the words formed from various 한자, and also of words formed from various native Korean elements.

Posted by sewing on Wednesday Apr 6, 2005 at 09:35 AM
Man, I should really preview what I write!

Fred Lukoff was a professor in the States, but he was prominent in Korean Studies. The book I’m thinking of is called “A First Reader in Korean Writing in Mixed Script,” published in 1982 by Yonsei University Press and evidently out of print now. Well, it would seem fairly dry and boring by today’s standards anyhow.

And those links for A Guide to Korean Characters (not that you should necessarily rush out and buy it) are this for the publisher’s page and this for Amazon.

Posted by sewing on Wednesday Apr 6, 2005 at 09:45 AM
Ah, I found Lukoff’s book on Naver here. And funnily enough, one of the reviews of Bruce K. Grant’s book at Amazon also mentioned Lukoff’s book. That’s how limited the English-language resources are on Korean, that everyone ends up owning the same books!

Posted by sewing on Wednesday Apr 6, 2005 at 09:57 AM
Okay, I see now that there’s a “Link” button above the text edit window. I won’t try messing around with the HTML tags next time. :(

Posted by sewing on Wednesday Apr 6, 2005 at 09:58 AM
Argh, even my emoticon :( got messed up! (Line break between the : and the ( .) Ah, now I see there’s also a “Smilies” button.

Posted by sewing on Wednesday Apr 6, 2005 at 10:02 AM
Hey, ㄴㅇㄷㅇ ㅠㅇㅜㅌ (or 왕음치 or 마익 or…):

How do you get the comments page to appear for a page you’ve written? When I click on 댓글 for the article I posted (”-는 곳,” the one above yours), the page comes up blank. What gives?

Posted by sewing on Wednesday Apr 6, 2005 at 11:57 AM
Haha~ Thanks for the info sewing. The buttons are your friend~ I always just publish stuff and then fix it ‘cause I’m used to doing that with my blog, so I don’t often preview comments either. It’s just not a habit, I guess.

I looked for an 옥편 before I went to China actually, but I decided it’s not for me yet. I’m not to the point where I would use it, or where I would know how to use it. I’d like to get to the point where I can use a Korean 옥편 (many of them have English definitions as well). That way I could pracitce my Korean vocab while using the jade volume. I hope by the time I’m at the level to use one, my Korean vocab will be at a level where I can use the Korean version…

Posted by ã„´ã…‡ã„·ã…‡ ã… ã…‡ã� on Wednesday Apr 6, 2005 at 12:04 PM
아...어디에..글씨써야할지.모르겠뜸

Posted by bluefox on Wednesday Apr 6, 2005 at 12:22 PM
I’m not sure sewing . I suggest writing a support email to 왕음치, but I think he’s really swamped these days, so be patient.

Posted by ã„´ã…‡ã„·ã…‡ ã… ã…‡ã� on Wednesday Apr 6, 2005 at 12:25 PM
Has anyone mentioned this book yet ?

Korean reader for Chinese characters by Choon-Hak Cho, Yeon-Ja Sohn, Heisoon Yang.

I asked my public library to acquire this book and they did. Since I already know Chinese, I found this book to be of little use.

Posted by HuangSY on Wednesday Apr 6, 2005 at 12:44 PM
I looked for an 옥편 before I went to China actually, but I decided it’s not for me yet. I’m not to the point where I would use it, or where I would know how to use it. I’d like to get to the point where I can use a Korean 옥편 (many of them have English definitions as well). That way I could practice my Korean vocab while using the jade volume.
“Jade volume”: I like that! I like to think of it as the “jewel book,” myself. Let me say quite frankly that most 玉篇 are fairly unhelpful in learning Korean. I’m fascinated by them all the same—I have five of them (which is not to brag: really, only one should be necessary!) And I starting using them when I was still at a very low beginner’s level, which means that I got very little benefit from them at the time. And they’re actually not that great for vocabulary practice, since a lot of the Korean words used in them (especially for the definitions) are archaic, and the example words shown that use a particular character are often obscure. So that’s why I mentioned that if you do ever decide to buy one, make sure you get one that has fairly long lists of sample words that are actually words you’d use in everyday life. The small paperback 동아 신활용옥편 (新活用玉篇), 2nd edition (2001) is good in that respect, but it doesn’t have any English definitions! As I mentioned before, the Korean defintions sometimes use archaic or obscure words (it’s kind of a centuries-old tradition, I guess), so the English really helps.

Posted by sewing on Wednesday Apr 6, 2005 at 12:59 PM
Thanks for the advice sewing~ I think I’ll put off buying one for now (though if I do get one, it’ll mostly be for the fact that it looks cool on a shelf), but when I do decide to get one, I’ll be sure to take all that into consideration.

If I decide to take a Korean class in Seoul when I get back (which is quite likely), I might get one for use there. It depends on the teacher, I guess~

By the way, I had a similar problem with a comment not working, but then many others work…it might just be a random glitch?

Posted by ã„´ã…‡ã„·ã…‡ ã… ã…‡ã� on Wednesday Apr 6, 2005 at 10:35 PM
Alas, nothing’s really random in computers…whenever a bug appears, there’s always a reason, no matter how obscure. But basically, yeah, I guess it was a transitory thing.

Yeah, don’t worry about rushing out and buying one, but they definitely do look cool on a bookshelf!

Posted by sewing on Thursday Apr 7, 2005 at 12:31 AM
I would also recommend A Guide to Korean Characters. It was a big help for me long long ago and I think a whole generation of Korean learners reserve a special place for it in their hearts. It’s probably time for more comprehensive one, but it’s still a classic that has not been surpassed, IMHO.

At risk of again sounding like something of a jerk in my experience with Korean language teaching there are a lot of foreign learners who spend *comparatively* too much time on hanja and particularly on hanja-based words.

One definately needs to learn hanja (even if you don’t actually write them) and that will help you with hanja-based Korean words, which you will indeed need.

The risk is spending most of your time on that and not nearly enough on other things like grammar and non-hanja words. Hanja is fun for the Western learner just for being hanja but - despite what most native speakers of Korean think since their experience is different - learning hanja and hanja-based words is actually much more straightforward and though there are other reasons that reason alone makes it easier, too. Hanja has been studied by speakers of Western languages for centuries and is very well organized, catalogued, and learning it can be done in a very structured fashion.

Korean grammar is difficult and harder to get a hold of than hanja and probably less fun for most. The problem is that there are particularly hard-core Korean words like 희끄무레하다 and of course onomatopoeia, which as everyone knows is very common in Korean and sometimes even written Korean. To know Korean well you need to know such things. But they’re not as well defined and studied as hanja and I suspect the difficulty in approaching them is the second biggest reason a lot of foreigners spend more time with hanja. (The other being that hanja is itself a novelty and fun.) Hanja is something you can master mostly while sitting at your desk. The rest of Korean is not.

The often quoted claim that 70 percent of Korean vocabulary is hanja is problematic. To begin with, the men who made the dictionaries when that statement was dominant were men educated in Japanese and who (not necessarily as a direct result) took hanja words more seriously and I think it is vastly overstating reality. For example, they counted every possible combination of hanja words (like calling dead, bolt, and deadbolt as three words, which is of course fine but with hanja there’s no knowing when to stop), while reducing non-hanja words to the smallest number of definitions possible, writing, for example, “See X” instead of defining “XX.” Also, the lexocographical work the claim was based on was prescriptive, so a word that was in wide-use outside of Seoul was often not included at all in dictionaries whereas hanja words alwasy got into the dictionary as “standard language,” though there are some legitimate sociolinguistic reasons for that.

I’m not trying to make any specific recommendations other than that I’ve always encouraged people to try to achieve balance. I’ve seen foreigners in Korea for decades with a deep and active intrest in hanja and as a result are quite knowledgeable but who still have problems dissecting only intermediate Korean sentences.

Posted by oranckay on Saturday Apr 9, 2005 at 02:26 PM
오랑캐 wrote:
I would also recommend A Guide to Korean Characters. It was a big help for me long long ago and I think a whole generation of Korean learners reserve a special place for it in their hearts. Itâ€™s probably time for more comprehensive one, but itâ€™s still a classic that has not been surpassed, IMHO.
I agree. Bruce K. Grant’s book was my first exposure to Hanja. I mentioned it, in fact, in an earlier comment further up this page. And I agree that one needs to find a balance. I for one did go overboard on Hanja early on, when I should have been focussing more of my resources on grammar and conversational ability.

Posted by sewing on Saturday Apr 9, 2005 at 05:30 PM
Oranckay, what you wrote about the 70% figure is very interesting. I wasn’t aware of any of that (i.e., how the figure was arrived at). And it’s interesting how the scholars involved deliberately played up Hanja words and played down native Korean words. Regarding prescriptivism, however, that’s still the name of the game though, isn’t it? If it’s spoken in 서울, it’s not considered dialect by Seoulites. And we have the distinction between 표준어 (ㅇ) and 비표준어 (x), and dictionary definitions advising our benighted selves that this or that word is 비표준어 (no, no, no! You mustn’t use it!)....

Posted by sewing on Saturday Apr 9, 2005 at 05:37 PM
Someone writing in English once said that the nineties were the “decade of the dictionary” for Korea.

The prescriptive dictionaries that weren’t even anywhere near half complete as that goes were written in the 60’s and 70’s. In the 90’s there were a few dictionaries that were more descriptive and done based on more scientific lexicography. Yonsei was the first with a new dictionary and there have been others. The NAKL’s dictionary is the largest (so far) and while it dose call things ‘방언’ when not 표준어 at least the 방언 is included, whereas the old geezers used to just leave words out for being 방언.

There are words that are traditionally particular to Seoul which aren’t 표준어, but as you know Seoul talk is closest to standard for virtue of being the basis for standard.

The “70 percent” claim isn’t heard as much anymore but you used to hear it a lot, in Korean as well but frequently among internationals studying it. It wasn’t entirely true then and it will only be less accurate as time goes on.

Posted by oranckay on Saturday Apr 9, 2005 at 06:27 PM
My impression (and it’s no more than a general impression from scanning dictionary pages over the years) is that the number of words does seem to consist of a lot of hancha-based words. Maybe 60~70%? But that’s just the words in a dictionary. Its a different story when you talk about the percentage of a typical conversation (especially) or piece of text (somewhat less so) made up of hancha-based words.

Posted by ë§ˆì?µ on Saturday Apr 9, 2005 at 10:51 PM
I think it’s really quite a bit like English. Just as with native Korean words in Korean, most of the English function words and commonly used concrete nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs come from Germanic (via Anglo-Saxon or Norse), while the more fancy-schmancy words all seem to come from Greek or Latin (often via Norman French), as is the case with Sino-Korean words. As in Korean, whether you’re speaking or writing, what you’re talking about, and what level you’re communicating on (presenting an academic paper versus having a well-deserved beer after you’ve presented the paper) makes a significant difference in the breakdown of your vocabulary between Germanic and Greco-Latin words.

Posted by sewing on Sunday Apr 10, 2005 at 03:19 AM
Learn Hanja the fun way is definitely a great book to learn 한자 and also to test your 한글 vocabulary with. I agree with ㄴㅇㄷㅇㅠㅇㅜㅌ, it’s the most enjoyable Korean/Hanja textbook I’ve come across so far. I haven’t got through it yet, I’ve had a university distance course get in the way. But, I like studying it when I have free time.

Posted by Ben on Saturday Apr 23, 2005 at 03:59 AM
I, Captain Porridge - operator of the world’s largest website providing info on Korea’s most hated and evil cult, would like to say that I just bought the book described above and I like it.

http://falsemessiah.proboards23.com

The End

Posted by CaptPorridge on Wednesday Jul 20, 2005 at 10:27 PM
I just got this book earlier in the week. I’m pretty stoked about it. My only complaint is that it isn’t really designed to teach writing well. Sure, there are tiny stroke order diagrams, but nothing that you could trace over and practice. It would be nice if they had a few squares underneath each entry where that show the character being constructed..and some to practice on your own…

Other than that…it’s a fantastic book.

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난 한국어 잘 했으면 좋겠어요.

Posted by 오스틴 on Friday Nov 16, 2007 at 12:00 PM
Good to hear, it’s still on my “to buy” list.

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호랑이 굴에들어가야 호랑이 새끼를 잡는다

Posted by 王音癡 on Monday Nov 19, 2007 at 01:21 PM
I’ve just found about the book, but am still wondering: how many hanja does this volume cover?

Posted by Yuji on Friday Nov 30, 2007 at 07:39 AM
Fred Lukoff, who was my father, was indeed a professor at Yonsei in the 1950s and 1960s. He taught at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, from 1964 to 1989, when he retired. He passed away in 2000.

Posted by Benjamin Lukoff on Thursday Dec 4, 2008 at 07:18 AM