I learned a little Korean 20 years ago. I had a Korean friend who helped me. But he moved. Now I have decided to take it up again.
There are several reasons:

1. I have been learning Chinese for more than 20 years. Although I understand that Koreans do not use the Chinese characters any more, if it is originally a Chinese word, the hanjia is indicated in my Korean dictionary. Although the pronuncation is often very different from Mandarin, nevertheless it helps memorizing a lot. And I discover there are lots of Chinese words in Korean. So it should be possible for me to learn.

2. I have never been to Korea. But I have been to China many times. When I visited Jilin province in 2001 I believe I was as close to Korea as it is possible. I was on the top of Paektusan on the border to N. Korea. It is a vulcano lake and very beautiful. I could see into N. Korea. And I can understand that in such a wilderness it is possible for N. Koreans to cross the border. Many Koreans live in Jilin. So the refugees will have no problem with the language.
I noticed the difference between Korean and Jilin food. I prefered Korean food. It is spicy. Jilin food is salt. And I found eating dog meat exotic. Actually even the Chinese in Jilin often prefer Korean food.
Anyway I thought it would be interesting to learn more about the relations between Koreans and Chinese.

3. Some years ago I met an American who used to teach English in Korea. He said that although English is not my native language, he was convinced it would not be difficult to find a job as an English teacher in Korea. I think this whould be very interesting.

4. I am very interested in politics. And I think discussing is a very good way to improve ones language skill. Unfortunately discussing delicate issues in Chinese forums is not so easy. My posts usually were deleted. But I discovered a Chinese forum called Tianya, where I have even discussed topics like Taiwan independence and Dalai Lama. The chinese forumites are cursing me. But that is OK.
I discovered many threads where the Chinese were cursing the Koreans. Among other things this has to do with Paektusan. The Chinese forumites are furious that Koreans dare to say that the mountain is theirs. There were no Korean forumites. So I would very much like to know the Korean version of the issue.

Well I stop here for this time. It would be interesting to have some comments, especially about the relations between Chinese and Koreans.

Thanks for the great intro! Welcome to the site!

Mike

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Hello ! Nict to meet you ! Im Korean.
Yes, you're right. Korean word is made based on Hanja(Chinese) more than 80 %. So, we are called it Korea, Japan, China is Hanja culture area.
To say........ in the past, China was our big brother, and Japan was our younger brother. we accepted China culture and then taught to Japanese who as benighted savages.
But, Unfortunately, our younger brother(Japan) is the most clever among brothers at present.
Anyway, I'd like to know Chinese forum. Would you tell me that website ?

Have a good day.

This is the website:

http://www.tianyaclub.com/

And this is a thread about Koreans that i participated in:

http://cache.tianya.cn/pub/c/worldlo...555.1110.shtml

So you can read Chinese?

I will be away for a couple of weeks. Hope to talk to you when i come back.

oh...God..... I don't know Chinese.....
Do they have any English version website ?

Not entirely accurate. Hanja are still used in Korea, but not to the same extent as they were in past decades.

The story of how hanja became part of the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese languages is an interesting one (at least - it's interesting to me). Note: the Vietnamese stop using hanja in the 19th century.

As far as Japan and Korea go, before they developed their own indigenous alphabets around five centuries ago (give or take 100 years - it's not really important to the point I am trying to make), the only written language in either country was hanja. China was the dominent culture of the time, and it had a writing system.

In terms of written language, what happened after Korea and Japan developed their own writing systems is very interesting. Of course, we know that both countries have continued to use hanja to this day. However, the Koreans only use them for words that came from China (Sino-Korean words). Thus, the word 사용하다 (meaning to use or to utilize) can be written in hangul, or it can be written using hanja (使用하다). The equivalent pure Korean word (쓰다), can only be written in hangul.

The Japanese, on the other hand, not only write Sino-Japanese words in hanja, they also write pure Japanese words using hanja. Thus, the word used in the previous example can be written in hiragana as しようする (for all intents and purposes, the Japanese equivalent of the spelling of the word 사용하다), or it can be written using hanja (使用する - する being equivalent of "하다"). Up until this point, everything is essentially the same between the two languages in terms of how hanja are used. However, the equivalent pure Japanese word for "use" can be written in hiragana as つかう (tsu-ka-u), AND it can also be written using hanja: 使う. Notice that the first two syllables "つか" have been replaced by the hanja. This is a minefield for the non-native speaker attempting to learn Japanese – as there is no rhyme or reason as to when a hanja replaces one, two, or three syllables.

The Japanese categorize these two types of readings as “on-yomi” (equivalent Korean translation: 음읽기 or 音읽기) and kun-yomi (equivalent Korean translation: 훈읽기 or 訓읽기). On-yomi is the reading for Sino-Japanese words, and kun-yomi is the reading for hanja representing pure Japanese words. Obviously, there is no such thing as a kun-yomi in Korean, only the on-yomi.

In Japanese, an on-yomi can only have one syllable (or very technically speaking, it can have two in you include those syllables which have the equivalent of a Korean "ㄴ" 받침). However, a kun-yomi can have as many as four syllables (I haven't ever seen a word with more than four - they may, however, exist). As an example, I will use the word east. Strangely enough, I don't believe there is a pure Korean word for east (at least not a word that is commonly known). In any event - in Japanese the hanja 東 can be pronounced using the on-yomi "to" (as we see in the first syllable of the capital city Tokyo), or it can be pronounced using the kun-yomi "hi-ga-shi" (as in the expression eastern Japan - 東日本 - or higashi nihon). As you can see, the reading "higashi" has three syllables.

This mixing of readings creates quite a difficulty for foreigners trying to learn the proper pronunciation of Japanese words, because on-yomi and kun-yomi are frequently mixed up in the same word or expression - as in the aforementioned example higashi nihon, where higashi is a pure Japanese word and nihon is a Sino-Japanese word. Another example is the word television program - ban-gumi. The hanja writing for this word is 番組 (번조 in Korean). If both characters are read using the on-yomi, it would be pronounced ban-so. However, the second character is pronounced using the kun-yomi (gumi). The only way you can learn the proper pronunciation is to simply learn to remember that the reading for the first hanja is the on-yomi, and that for the second hanja is the kun-yomi. Of course, a situation like this never arises in the Korean language (thank goodness).

Unfortunately, there are not that many good texts available to assist English speakers in learning the Korean usage of hanja. I know of two that are worth looking into:

"Guide to Korean Characters: Reading and Writing Hangul and Hanja" by Bruce K. Grant. This is a down and dirty overview of the 1,800 basic characters used by Koreans. This book has been around for at least 25 years. It works somewhat like a Korean hanja dictionary (옥편 玉編 ok-pyun). This is available at Amazon.com.

Another is "A First Reader in Korean Writing in Mixed Script" by Fred Lukoff. Fred Lukoff, now retired, was a reknowned professor of Korean at the University of Washington. This book is not suitable for those who don't already speak Korean well, but it is an outstanding book for learning hanja usage. Although Amazon.com lists this as being out of print, I believe I have seen it within the past year at Kyobo Book Store in Seoul. It is probably still available somewhere - however it will require a little digging to get a copy.

Regarding differences in Korean and Japanese use of characters: Japanese tend to use more short forms, while Koreans tend to stick with long forms. While they often look similar (kind of like the difference between upper-case letters and lower-case letters in the English alphabet), it can be a little tricky at times determining if a particular character is the corresponding long or short form of another character. Furthermore, there is the matter of on-yomi and kun-yomi in Japanese versus only on-yomi (or Sino-Korean pronunciation) in Korean.

Because it tends to stick with long forms, Korean character usage is similar to Taiwan's (which I assume wants to distinguish itself from the mainland by not using the short forms that are the norm there).

About ten years ago I purchased a dictionary written by a gentleman named Jack Halpern (born in Germany, raised in the US, who has lived in Japan for the last 3-4 decades).

He came up with an absolutely ingenious method of easily and quickly looking up hanja. His dictionary, unfortunately, is only for the Japanese usage of hanja, however. I emailed him and asked him to consider including the Korean pronunciations written in hangul. He responded saying he would consider it (nothing ever became of it - I thought he might do it with the incentive of furthering sales of the book). This method could be adopted for Korean with almost no effort at all because a Chinese character is a Chinese character, regardless of the language within which it is being used.

A link to Jack Halpern's website: (http://www.kanji.org/kanji/dictionaries/njecd/njec d.htm).

I can talk more about this subject, but I've already missed the first 30 minutes of the baseball game I planned on watching - so I gotta run!!

I began learning Korean using "An Introductory Course in Korean" by Lukoff. I then continued using "A First Reader in Korean Writing in Mixt Script".
While the first book explains Korean grammar at lenght, there are no explanations except to hanja in the second book.
I believe that was the reason I gave up Korean 20 years ago. My Korean friend had moved, so I had no one to ask.
Now I have repeated the first book again and use it as a grammar while reading the second. I also use "Dong-A`s New Little English Dictionary". Unfortunately I cannot find all that i need. I find korean grammar very complicated. There are lots of different endings. And often parts of endings are deleted, so that you have to guess. Maybe this is no problem to Koreans. But I think a lot of endings are unnecessary. E.g. why do they have to use different endings depending on the situation and your relation to the person you are talking to? Why make things more complicated than they are? This must make it very difficult for foreigners to be accepted in Korean society. Right?

As I have no one to ask about grammar, maybe you could help me. Here is one example:

한반도의 길이는 천이 백 킬로미터이다 . 잇수로는 삼천리다.

The Korean peninsula is 1100 km long. ?????? is 3000 li. (I cannot find that word in the dictionary)

So if someone can help me i would be most grateful.

Before western units of distance measurement became the norm in Korea, the standard unit of distance measurement for long distances was li (리 哩).

It's no longer used (well...maybe some elderly country folks still use it), but Koreans are still very familiar with it.

It's in the song Arirang (아리랑):

아리랑 아리랑 아라리요 아리랑고개를 넘어간다.
나를 버리고 가시는 님은 십리도 못가서 발병난다.

The expression you've posted says, "The Korean peninsula is 1,200 kilometers long. It's 3,000 li <long when measured> in li." Some quick arithmatic tells us that one li is roughly .4 kilometers.

The problem you've run into in this sentence is not related to grammar - it's a matter of the same word being spelled two different ways due to a syllable position and pronunciation change.

잇수로는 삼천리다.

The two syllables marked in blue are the same word, based on the same hanja (哩).

In many cases, a word that begins with a ㄹchanges to a silent letter when it is in the first syllable position. However, it stays a ㄹ when it appears in the second or later syllable.

To further complicate this particular expression, you have another special spelling that occurs as a result of an alternate spelling based on pronunciation. The first syllable (잇) has a "시엇 받침" (an "s" in the lower position of the syllable) because it is followed by a syllable that begins with the "s" sound.

So while it would normally be spelled either "이" or "리," in this case, it has the special spelling "잇" because it is followed by the syllable "수."

This is rather "deep" stuff in terms of learning Korean. Of course, there is nothing wrong with learning obscure aspects of the language, however, I think you'd be better served to learn more of the basics before getting into stuff like this.

Thank you very much for your quick and clear explanation! If you are a teacher you must be a very good one. I can´t help wondering which is your native language- English or Korean - or maybe both? But obviously you know Japanese as well. What about Chinese?

I suppose you are right about learning more of the basics. But I only have the two books by Lukoff and the dictionary. And I can understand most of the texts. The example i gave was the only thing i could not understand in the first lesson. There is nothing in the second. But could you please help me with this from the third:

비가 걷히거 난 팔월에는 서열이 상당하다

I cannot understand the expression 걷히거 난
I guess it means something like the rain has stopped.
As for 상당하다 ,my dictionary gives "proper","suitable" etc. But I thought it is very hot now in august.

Could you also translate Arirang for me? I understand something like it is hard to walk so long and you get sick. Is Arirang a mountain?