Monday, May 28, 2007

漢字

Before I came to Taiwan, I studied Korean-style Chinese characters for a couple of months. It helped me with my grasp of more advanced Korean vocabulary, and was a good way fo rme to get acclimated to Chinese characters before coming here.

Chinese and Korean aren't related the way English and German are, and the basic grammar and vocabulary are quite dissimilar. But thousands of Chinese words have entered the Korean language in much the same way that English has adopted thousands of Latin words over the centuries.

I'm intrigued by the fact that you can usually see the phonetic similary, but not always. 生 is sheng in Mandarin and seng in Korean; 好 is hao in Mandarin and ho in Korean; 人 is ren in Mandarin and in in Korean; 光 is gwang in both Mandarin and Korean; 漢 is han in both Mandarin and Korean. But 學 is xue in Mandarin and hak in Korean, for some reason. Interesting.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i found your blog through a taiwanblogs site, and i'm glad i did! i'm taiwanese but haven't been back in the home country for awhile, so miss it dearly!

from the very tiny tiny bit of korean i'm becoming familiar with by watching korean dramas, it seems like korean pronunciation adds in mandarin, taiwanese, and cantonese. that's how i make sense of it, anyway.

have fun!

-grace

Anonymous said...

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