**PLEASE READ BEFORE COMMENTING** Yes, I know there are mistakes in my Korean, and that 道 means road and not 到. If you see something wrong in the video or wish to throw in your two cents, feel free to leave a comment. Just make sure that the comment you’re leaving hasn’t already been made. I’ll probably be 80 before I mistype 道 again.
i don't know if someone already mentioned, but 5:13 it should be gugyeol in Korea and "Kundoku" in Japan. Kanbun just means classical chinese. Also, Korean gugyeol don't rearrange the order to read
@@TrueSchwar Well what i mean is Korean Gugyeol reading of classical chinese, they dont add the ➀②レ things to manipulate word orders, instead, they just treat huge chunk of text as a verb and put the verb ending. For example: 大學之道，在明明徳，在親民，在止於至善。 Japanese Kanbun Kundoku: 大學之道，在③明②明徳➀，在レ親レ民，在③止②於至善➀。 Actual reading order: 大學の道は、明徳を明らかにするに在り、民を親たにするに在り、至善に止まるに在り。 Korean Gugyeol Reading: 大學之道는, 在明明徳하며, 在親民하며, 在止於至善이니라. imho the Gugyeol sounds like they just add the verb ending and the particles as verbal punctuations and no where near Korean language, while Kanbun Kundoku gives a much more colloquial (at the time it was translated) text by rearranging the characters using the Kundokuten (the ➀②レ markings indicating the reading precedence) as well as incorporating more flexible Rebus readings. Doing this, Japanese wisely merge the actual meaning of the sentence into the Classical Chinese text, and avoided the need of another paragraph for translation. Gugyeol on the other hand uses only loan pronunciations, and the Korean meaning is listed at the end of the CC text as another paragraph. Japanese Reading taken from here: esdiscovery.jp/knowledge/classic/china/dai005.html Korean Reading taken from here: encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0025709
I had the opposite experience. I speak Japanese, but took a little Chinese in college. I could easily read and understand most of the written Chinese, but I had extreme problems pronouncing it.
I've been learning Japanese for just over a year. I honestly have no need for it. I don't live in Japan, I don't work with Japanese people, I don't have any Japanese friends. I'm not even into anime or manga. People think I'm mad. The reason I started is a bit dumb. My teenage daughter started and she wanted me to learn with her. When school got busy, she gave up, and I have become quite obsessed. I truly LOVE Kanji. I see tremendous beauty in them, as well as the internal logic. I know, I'm a nerd. That's ok, I admit it.
I‘m also close to 1 year of studying the language! I might be in Japan right now, but have no intention of ever living here after I return home. Still, I also became kinda obsessed with the language and hope to keep up this motivation for the next years coming!
I am a native Chinese speaker. When I travelled in Japan, I can understand meaning of their logo/restaurant menus/subway station names/library even I don't know how they pronounce in Japanese.
As an English speaker, when I travelled to Japan, I can understand the meaning of many advertisements and product names as I can read Katakana (mainly used for foreign loan words). Most of the time, you can guess the English meaning simply by reading the Katakana.
@@yvr2002rtw but that is unless you know how to read katakana? because a person without prior knowledge of katakana cannot understand it , whereas Mrdoleagle said even without prior knowledge of Japanese, Chinese people can read the word and understand what it means as it's in kanji(Chinese)
@@fourzonesable But as a CHinese,although we never have studier any words or prnonunce about Japan.Only by our CHinese characters frame,we can also read these thing.Don't forget.CHina is the cultural suzerain of East Asia.Many Japanese words originated in China,and Korea(Both contrys)'s grammar system is even derived from China, and their language cannot function without Chinese characters.
Excellent video! As a Korean, some errata: 0:33 Your Korean pronunciation is impressive, but 한자 is one of the exceptions-it’s pronounced as 한짜 (han-jja) 1:04 男子은 should be 男子는. Also, horizontal Korean writing uses the Latin period symbol (.), not the block-width open circle found in Chinese/Japanese (。︀). 3:13 사과 means apple, not fruit (과일). 3:45 내를 should be 나를. 4:01 Typo here-나가 사롸를 should be 내가 사과를. 6:33 The word 비록 is still used today. 7:23 Typo-형찰 should be 향찰. 9:22 Same as 1:04. Also the word for TV in Korean is 티비 (from TV), or the more dated 테레비 (from テレビ). 12:53 One interesting aspect of linguistic nationalism is the push for native Korean words and given names. Some names cannot be written in hanja, like 하늘 (sky) and 슬기 (wisdom). 13:17 수도 (水道) means a water system, not a drain. Also, one extremely common homonym for 수도 is missing from the video-capital city (首都). In fact, that and 水道 are the only two everyday meanings for 수도. (Aside: In linguistics classes, these hanja homonym examples tend to list all the rare, archaic and extinct meanings for added effect. In reality, most homonyms have only 2-3 accepted meanings.) 14:25 Same as 9:22.
Nice video! But a few things to fix. (I'm Korean, and sorry for bad English 🤣) 03:47 "내가 과일을 먹어" & "나를 과일이 먹어". fruit is 과일 in Korean, while 사과 means apple. 04:08 "내가 과일을 먹어" (くだもの, fruit, is 과일 in Korean.) 06:20 I'm not sure if you are mentioning the modern Korean pronunciation of Hanja here. But if so, the pronunciation for 果 must be /kwa/, not /wa/. 07:23 "향찰". 09:36 "男子는 텔레비전을 봐." Actually we do not use "。" when writing Korean 한글. It is for Chinese and Japanese. 14:06 Yes, several years ago (and also when I was a little student), some Korean parents thought teaching Hanja to their children would help better understanding of language. And that is true; it really helps, I think. But the situation changes in recent years. Many parents in Korea have not actually learned Hanja themselves, and no more think learning Hanja is worth to invest time and cost. They have lived well enough without learning it! Now Korean schools do not teach much about Hanja to the students, reflecting this social change. So if you come to Korea now, you can find most little students do not know Hanja, except for a few easy and commonly used ones you mentioned in the video. Thus I think Hanja in Korean is actually going to be gradually disappeared, to which I personally a bit objective.
In historical mixed script “。” would be used no? Korea used Eastern style punctuation until Hangul exclusivity I’m pretty sure. Also, has the Korean government given up on trying to implement more hanja education? I only found a few newspaper articles in English about the government attempting to add more classes and increase hanja in school as well protests against it. But the last of those articles was from 2015, with the article about rising hanja classes from 2017.
Yes, in the past "。" was also used in Korean, but only when we write vertically. If you write sentence horizontally (just like nowadays) you still have to use ".". I don't know why 😂 And about the education, I think I have to confess that I'm not talking with official articles or other official evidence. I'm not sure whether or not schools are totally GIVING UP teaching Hanja. But I'm quite certain that many Korean parents are not as passionated as parents were several years ago. When I was a little student, I could see a lot of private academic institute in streets, which teaches Hanja to students. And I used to go one of those institutes to learn Hanja, too, which means my parents were willing to pay money for it. But learning Hanja privately was not really common even at that time. Among my friends I can barely find one who can read or write Hanja. I heard that this is getting more serious now, and parents nowadays do not want their children "waste" their time learning Hanja. They would rather teach English or math to their children (seriously). This is why we cannot find many academic institutes teaching Hanja now. And it is definately true that most Korean students do not know much about Hanja. (Of course they know 大中小.)
Yeah I'm Korean too and I cad add my ideas about learning Chinese in Korea. Back in time, my parent's generation, learned Chinese and those were like core classes(or required classes). And back in my generation around early 2010s, Korea(or Korean government) didn't taught Chinese in public schools. But most parents in early 2010s thought Chinese were important to understanding the history of hangul(Korean) so the parents(I learned Chinese too when i was little) paid money for their studies in Chinese(Just like you guys mentioned before). Moreover in 2023, most kids in Korea don't even know hanja. Parents think it is waste of time because of the competitivity of schools and universities in South Korea made parents think, "It is worth learning classes about English, Math, Korean, Computer Sci." ..etc. I personally think that most Korean parents know learning hanja is better for understanding history of hangul and other benefits. But in reality, learning many subjects cost money and time, Korean parents just thinks Korean, English, Math subjects were just more important than any other world languages(or elective classes). But there are some parents who let their children learn Chinese because they have time, money, and have interest in learning world language. Unfortunately, some parents these days don't even know hanja, importance of hanja and the relationship between those two languages, and most importantly these parents don't even dare to think the cultural and other importance between hangul and hanja.
@@kevinkim2405중간중간 중국어라고 하신 부분이 있는데 전부 한자 얘기 아니에요? 애들이 한자를 많이 배우던 건 기억나는데, 중국어는 그렇게까지 많이들 배우지 않았던 것 같습니다. 제가 학교를 90~00년대에 다녀서 좀 다를 수는 있는데, 중국어의 인기는 일본어와 비슷하거나 조금 낮은 수준이었던 걸로 기억합니다.
parents in korea dont really care about chinese characters nowadays. I live here in daechidong and this place is know to be a like a seat of learning for private education. This place is real fired up in sedning their kids to english preschools. These preschools costs a hell lot but they do. They care no shnaps bout chinese. But they do bout english.
Also in Korea, people just kept buying newspapers with less Hanja more, because it is convenient to read, so financially it was more viable just to go for Hangul.
So true, hanja became a thing of the past among the younger generation in the 90s~00s, resulting in the dropping of hanja education in school and usage of hanja in official documents
My opinion on why the Koreans were able to drop Chinese characters: Similar to roman characters, the Korean language can be combined to pronounce an extreme range of things that are not even used by Koreans. For example, 뷁 is a word that is pronounced Bwelk but would never be found in literature. This is significantly different than Japanese that only has 70 different ways of pronunciation + the ん so they only have 140 ways of pronouncing things. Due to the limitations, there are a lot of words that are pronounced the same way, much more so than Korean. Hence why they created an entirely separate alphabet with the exact same pronunciation just to distinguish foreign words! This is why intonation is important in the Japanese language but not in Korean. It would cause a lot of confusion if the Japanese dropped Kanji from their language. First, they would have to invent a system for spacing between characters. Next, they would have to create intonation marks to differentiate between various words. Koreans can always add Chinese characters next to it to detail what they are talking about. To Koreans, it is merely like the Roman language at this point. Good to know but not very useful outside of scholarly settings. Chinese characters were also something that the upper class or intellectuals used to boast their knowledge and had a pretentious lighting. My mother who went through the Korean school system in the 70s who was fully educated knows much less Chinese characters than me, a Korean-American who only learned Chinese characters by reading a lot of Chinese martial arts fiction. It was something that needed to be let go.
@@user-ye6ty9ie8g Which sounds better/correct... "...would have to invent a system for spaces...", "would have to invent a system for spacing between characters". Thanks for trying
Speaking as Korean, there are many wrong points but I will point out something importants only. 1. Hangul is already widely used in Chosun dynasty among common people. 2. Literacy rate both Hanja and Hangul has increased even during Japanese occupation. Mostly due to modern school system. Yes Japanese tried to teach Japanese language, but there were also many efforts to teach hangul for preserving Korean culture. 3. We NEVER EVER consider hanja or chinese character as symbol of Japanese occupation. We used this letter for 2000 years, and we adopted it as part of our culture. How can 36 years of Japanese occupantion could change our perspective? Rather we saw it as cultural influence of China. 4. The main reason why Korea give away hanja is a) we could b) it is way easier for us to use only Hangul. I don't feel Korean language specially have more homonyms than English. The example you given 수도 is mostly used only one case. The capital city. 4 example that you given are dead words. Hand knife is used as 손날 in modern days. Other 3 are I never heard of. They are not used in modern days. Drain 수도 is mostly conjugated with other words like 수돗물, 상수도, 하수도. After invention of hangul, we always knew that it is way easier to learn or to use if we dropped the hanja. Do you ever feel difficult to speaking English because you don't know Latin? Knowing Latin will help you understand the meaning of the words, but it doesn't mean that you feel difficult to using English even if you don"t know it. Then why we used hanja until 1980s? Partially because hanja was our official traditional writing system. Also partially by Japanese influence of mixing kanji with hirakana or katakana. Then, public opinion of using only hangul got bigger, saying that dropping hanja from our writing system will make easier for writing and learing. But traditionalists opposed to it saying that hanja is part of our tradition and we will loose connection to it if we don't know hanja. And that is where NATIONALISM takes part. We could slience thoes traditionalists voices with nationalistic public opinion. In conclusion, we dropped hanja because it was easier without it. Nationalism helped to slience who were oppose to it. It is NOT we dropped hanja by nationalistic motivation. Think reasonably. It is our daliy base writings. If not using hanja created any kind of inconvinience, it could not be continued just by nationalistic morivation. Homonyms? We can simply avoid them by choosing another words. For example both continuos winning and continous defeat is wrtten as 연패. This cam be confusing without hanja. But we can simply avoid it by using 연승 continous victory. For my point of view the reason why Japan could not give away kanji are 3 things. 1) Japanese, their open syllables made them to have less phonetic banks than Korean which makes them to have way more homonyms. 2) Hiragana and Katakana have long history of using together with kanji which made them insepratable. On the other hand hangul was relatively new, and its main purpose of creation is for thoes WHO DO NOT KNOW HANJA. 3) Koream hanja always have 1 syllable. On the other hand kanji is often 2 syllables. Makes sentences looks very long and less information conciseness if they don't use kanji.
Unlike Hanja that comes with both sound and meaning, I heard Hangul records only the sound, and easily causes confusion. One Korean lady told me, when a child is born, the child will be given "two names", one of them in Hanja.
@@yiqunyI think you misunderstood what she said. It is not that giving 2 names for a child. There are 2 name origins in Korea. One is pure Korean name and another is hanja based name. It is like bibilical(hebrew) origin names, german origin names, latin origin names are coexsiting in English.
Good comment, but Japan was not interested in promoting the Korean language. Towards the end, they attempted to Japaneseize Korea and make it a complete Japanan, not just a colony.
If you want to study the Korean language in depth, learning hanja will help you study vocabulary. You can analyze the etymology of any vocabulary. However, most people don't need to learn hanja, just like Europeans don't memorize Latin vocabulary. Nowadays, Koreans who love to learn and study in the modern era use hanja as a tool to store memories. Hanja is an encoding system created by the ancients, which is useful for encoding and retrieving images on flashcards.
I already knew a decent amount about the Japanese side of things but barely anything about the history of writing in Korea, so this was really interesting! A point I want to add is that IIRC Japanese has significantly more Sinitic-loanword homophones than Korean due to a simpler phonology and sound changes, so replacing kanji with hiragana would remove more information than replacing hanja with hangul - I don't know how much this made a historical difference in practice though.
Thanks! Also, that is an interesting point, but while researching about Kanji abolition in Japan, most of the arguments against getting rid of kanji were cultural or historical. The loan word argument did exist, but didn’t become prevalent until later, when people started asking why the Japanese didn’t drop Kanji.
@@eb.3764 They came from Middle Chinese not modern Southern Chinese languages. Modern languages of Southern China also underwent their own sound changes, no current Chinese language is identical to Middle Chinese or Old Chinese.
@@eb.3764 Mandarin is not any newer than Southern Chinese languages, with the exception of Min Chinese which is a descendant of a sister of Middle Chinese.
A very interesting video, in particular the history. As someone who learned Hiragana (and Katakana) a long time ago, long before I even had any thoughts of learning Japanese, I should find it easier to read Hiragana (children's books). But I don't. It's always been hard, and it still is. So, the paradox is that Kanji is a steep hill in the way of mastering reading (which, for me, is so essential to language learning), and yet - even with the subset I know, and with much more to learn, after years of this - as soon as I can read something with Kanji, everything is easier to read. The mix of Kanji with Hiragana providing the grammar (which is so very explicit in Japanese) makes it possible (as I wrote in another comment elsewhere) to see the structure of a sentence with just a glance. And that facilitates easy reading. If everything was written in Hiragana, as those aforementioned children's books, you have to parse every sentence sequentially. And of course run into homonyms all the time, and not seeing the difference between "words" and grammar etc. And there you have it. Kanji makes it hard to learn to read, but it also makes reading so much easier.That's the paradox.
at 4:21, "they just learn to read and write and speak Chinese." The "speak" part may not necessarily be true. Even the speech within the Chinese were extremely diverse and not intelligible. Additionally, despite Classic Chinese at first may really be the way how people speak, with time fleets and each dynasty crowned some different local languages to be the vernacular lingua franca of the whole nation, the speech of Chinese languages were diverging from the Classic Chinese. By the time when Hunminjeongeum was made, none of the Chinese, Korean, Japanese were actually speaking Classic Chinese, they just all learn this written language to transcript knowledge in paper forms. This is very much a paralog of Latin in the Europe, by certain time in the history, people don't know how to speak Latin really, but they all learn Latin as a writting language regardless of what their own verbal native languages are.
Very good analogy. Now the latin is actually dead, but Chinese is well and alive. The Koreans will learn hanja again I predict. Mother china preserves the Mongolian script as well in Inner Mongolia. Now the outer Mongolians are re-learning the traditional script after they switched to Cyrillic for 80 years. Uyghurs in China use Arabic scripts while their Turkic brothers in Turkey switched to Latin alphabetic. And I predict the Turkish will switch back to Arabic in the future.
As a foreigner learning Korean, I love hanja, and this was a very fascinating video. Ironically, I think learning hanja makes learning Korean so much easier, and I wish more people would take the time to appreciate them. And actually they're pretty easy to understand and remember once you understand stroke order and how chinese characters are constructed.
Koreans spend their whole lives memorizing Chinese characters, but they were so angry that they abolished Chinese characters. Memorizing Chinese characters is never easy. It must take up a lifetime. If you memorize it, you forget it; if you memorize it, you forget it. To read people's names and place names, you need to memorize at least 5,000 characters. This is the minimum number. Even if you memorize 10,000 characters, there are still many characters you don't know.
@@Joe-mr3zw yes but once you get used to reading at least around 1000 characters you'll understand the beauty and efficiency of knowing how to read chinese characters. it helps us memorize new words and avoid confusion
@@Joe-mr3zw You can become quite proficient when you learn 3000-4000 漢字. This should be adequate for handling words and sentences in daily life, including office settings and reading daily news. Or are you suggesting that using Hanja in Korean is incomparable to using 漢字 in the Chinese language? In English, you may not completely read news without any tools even you know 8000 words.
great video! may i make a suggestion? in the future, talk about vietnamese. different of korean and japanese, they completely ditched chinese characters (hán tự) and adopted a latin-based script.
I’m currently doing research into that, and was gonna add a bit near the end about it. But there is a bit of a problem with finding western sources for ‘han van’ vs ‘chu nom’, as well as the whole issue with colonialism and how that played out with a power struggle between the emperor and the political elite (I may be misremembering that part, as it’s late and I’m very tried as i type this). I think you can see why I didn’t include it in the video. I am planning on doing a video though, going over the history of writing in Vietnam. But might take a bit as I go through everything.
@@nomnaday thank you for the offer, but it’s a bit late unfortunately as I’ve already made a video on Chu Nom and Chu Han. I don’t think I went into what Han van was in it. If you want to watch it, it’s up on the channel. Feel free to correct me in it if I’ve said anything wrong. I’ll definitely call upon your services though if I ever make a video about Vietnamese or Vietic writings again.
It is not a proud that vietnam gave up their country's letters. And even viet(far) nam(south from china). Your country name ethymology is colonial name.
Also korean has more complicated pronunciations, which helps them to identify the meaning of Chinese-loaned words. Japanese have less diversity in pronunciations, so there are too many homonyms that kanji is essential for understanding its meaning.
@@almost_Zombie i meant that there are a lot of kanjis that sound the same because there are less diverse in sounds. Korean hanjas usually have complicated pronunciations, so there is less possibility of homonyms existing.
I don't think that Korean has a lot of complicated pronunciations. In fact, just like the video stated, there are a ton of words that is pronounced the exact same. Furthermore Koreans doesn't have a phonetical system as in Chinese. But the only thing that might help, is of course, the context itself. CMIIW :) Just my opinion
@@ivan_valerian Korean has more diverse pronunciations than Japanese at least. There are quite a lot of words that sound same in Japanese but different in Korean actually.
10 місяців тому+2
That's a myth. When people speak they understand each other even with several homophones. No need for a special writing system just for that!
One of my favorite things about Japanese is that people are so used to using three entirely different orthographies that they are happy to *add* even more whenever they want to. I have never encountered a language that is more happy to randomly insert other scripts in the middle of sentences than Japanese and I absolutely love it. Simplified Chinese characters? Yup! Latin characters? Sure. Hangeul? Eh, why not. Devanagari? Go ahead! Hebrew? Couldn't hurt. Random unicode characters? Great!
Japanese and people in Taiwan and Singapore still use traditional or what I would call classical Chinese characters. The communist simplified the script for political reasons, to show they are increasing literacy. A committee changed the language developed over millennia. That' is disgusting in my opinion.
@@brucemoose926 Stupid. Traditional Chinese characters aren't ban in PRC . CPC decision to have simplified characters as official written language was and is... due to pragmatism.
@@brucemoose926 "Disgusting in your opinion"... Please bother to learn more about Chinese history before you start making assumptions. The Chinese script was originally unified thousands of years ago due to political conquest. In the 19th and 20th century, the majority of China was illiterate due to poverty and lack of access to proper education - only the wealthy could afford to read. Simplifying the script made knowledge far more accessible to the masses. ALL languages change due to sociopolitical reasons and institutions in power.
@@brucemoose926 A lot of the simplified characters are actually revived ancient versions. Outlier Linguistics has a lot of great information about the evolution of Han characters. If the history interests you, I highly recommend checking them out!
The video makes an optimistic conclusion about the use of Hanja, saying that Korea may use it again, but this is unlikely. To the younger generation, this just seems like the complaints of older people. Perhaps in the future, there will be more people who know Hanzi or Kanji than who know Hanja. Because if they don't learn a foreign language, it may become rare for Koreans to learn Chinese characters.
South Korean primary schools ceased the teaching of Hanja in elementary schools in the 1970s, although they are still taught as part of the mandatory curriculum in grade 6. They are taught in separate courses in South Korean high schools, separately from the normal Korean-language curriculum. Formal Hanja education begins in grade 7 (junior high school) and continues until graduation from senior high school in grade 12. In South Korea, Hanja are used most frequently in ancient literature, legal documents, and scholarly monographs, where they often appear without the equivalent Hangul spelling. Usually, only those words with a specialized or ambiguous meaning are printed in Hanja. In mass-circulation books and magazines, Hanja are generally used rarely, and only to gloss words already spelled in Hangul when the meaning is ambiguous. Hanja are also often used in newspaper headlines as abbreviations or to eliminate ambiguity.
Very interesting and informative. As a kid I remember encountering a Korean book from the 50s or 60s and was surprised to see that it had many Chinese characters. I remember asking about it and looking it up, and learning about the existence of Hanja, but not much about why it was eventually phased out, or anything from its history or use in mixed script.
13:50 Japanese has even MORE homonyms like this. Like... a TON. I think that, after you learn kanji, it is much easier to read Japanese than it is hiragana/katakana only. Interesting video, but I do wonder if it's really just nationalism in the end, and not partially practical.
Oh ya, Japanese has a lot of Homophones for sure. But the homophones don’t seem to be as big a problem in everyday spoken language as context is used, as well as a slightly different word choice from the written Language; and due to the nature of writing, the written language is more likely to contain archaic or literary words, which in turn artificially increases the number of homophones in a language, even if those words aren’t really used in speech all that often. So I’d expect, if Japanese where to get rid of Kanji, very quickly, a lot of those homophones that can’t be differentiated based on context, would slowly fade away except in certain literary works, and writing as a whole would emulate the spoken language, at least in word choice. Basically it would follow the same path Korean took after it “abolished” hanja. Finally about the nationalism. Ya, definitely not the only reason. History is complex with many things influencing certain events all the time. A main point of this video was to show a pretty big part of the discussion that often gets overlooked. PS. Love your content
@@TrueSchwar Thanks! Yeah I could see that. It would certainly make the language more accessible. With that said, the archaic words that fit many situations so perfectly would be sad to see go. So I, personally, hope kanji stays. Would I HATE if it went? No. But I do find it fun. 😊
I'm an American living in Japan and learned Kanji along with vocabulary. I worked in international trade companies my whole life and never had a problem with reading. When I had my son I would read him children's books that were all Kana. My brain melted. It's so hard to read kana alone and follow along with what's being written. Kanji is essential.
This is actually not true. The Japanese created some simplistic system in the 90s that used only Hiragana and Katakana but had spaces between the words and it was very readable
@@starfox300Kanji is that rare kind of thing where it's hard to master but the end product eventually outwheighs the deficits. It's crazy how many kinds of unique expressions are possible with the 3 writting system model the japanese language has.
@@starfox300 It's not very readable, unfortunately. (And it wasn't invented in the 90's - it's always been there, at least since Hiragana was invented, and that's not exactly new). Our house has many such books. They're for children. And they're hard to read. In Japan children learn that way, and then they learn Kanji all through school. I suspect that this isn't actually very efficient. Adults can learn Kanji much faster than that (it should be the other way around, as it is for everything else - language, for example. Or music notation, which you can learn quickly as a child, but adults have a horrible time learning it. But with efficient methods adults can learn Kanji must faster than Japanese children in Japanese schools - they keep learning all through high school. That should tell us that something is wrong here). My wife teaches Japanese to (non-Japanese) children. There's no source material, so she creates everything herself (she has an educational background though), and, as part of that, just jumped straight ahead to incorporating Kanji when teaching the children to read and write. They absorbed it *easily*. I'm now convinced that this is the way to go - just learn the real stuff right away, don't waste years focusing on Hiragana/Katakana and slowly introducing Kanji one by one, the traditional way.. just dive right in.
@@makokx7063 It's not terrible it is VERY comprehensible. You do not need Kanji at all, just as when you speak to someone with your mouth, you cannot convey which Kanji you are using, but through the context the listener knows what you mean
Actually, Korea had their own version of simplified syllabus & scripts just like Katakana called Idu and used until creation of Hangul script. So they have used classical Hanja scripts along with Idu for reading, usually not used in official documents as these were handled by highly educated elite literati's of upper class Koreans.
You didn't even get halfway through the video before assuming that it was never going to address this and commenting. 6:10 is where Idu gets explained.
Imagine if Emperor Meiji had ordered Japan to adopt the Latin alphabet in the 1800s. That's just about the only way Kanji could have been abolished. I think the effect of low vs high literacy rates on education policy and standardisation before and after key turning points like WW2 is a key observation from this video.
Umm no given how many homophones Japanese have it would be even harder to replace Kanji with romanisation, it would be easier to use pure kana, except of course it would still be confusing lol
My favorite alternative history scenario is one where instead of banning Christianity and closing the country for 200 years, Japan converted to Christianity in its entirety.
I heard that some Japanese, especially young people, are playing with the "fake Chinese" （伪中国语）, which uses kanji only. They even tried to communicate with Chinese using that, of cause it leads to some misunderstandings, but works most of the time.
@@langhsichang Chinese is a SVO language whereas Japanese operates in SOV, so “fake Chinese” would be something like using all Chinese characters but using Japanese sentence structure: 我，你的文章理解可能。
@@lamlam-bw7ev that's interesting. But in oral Chinese, we won't strictly follow the svo structure. Take the "I might understand your writing" for example, it could go as "你的文章我能理解", that's for Chinese being highly parataxis, which makes wrong sentences right once you can make yourself understood.
As someone who knows a bit of Japanese, I dread texts that are in pure kana, such as you’d find in old video games. Pure kana is difficult to understand, because I can never be sure of a word’s meaning without seeing the kanji. I’m happy that Japanese kept kanji around.
In my experience as a Chinese learning Japanese, reading やまとことば aka pure native Japanese words in pure kana isn’t that difficult, even for long words like いちじるしい or まぎらわしい, but I dread reading 漢語 (Chinese loanwords) without kanji, especially during a time sensitive environment like during the tests.
13:51 su-do is not used for "hand knife" "tunnel" "prisoner" ever. so those are not the problem. but su-do can also mean "capital city", which is a commonly used word.
Another reason would be the number of sound variations between the two languages. There are not many consonants and vowels in the Japanese language, while there are a lot more variations in the Korean language. Accordingly, compared to the Japanese language, there would be a lot fewer homonym issues in the Korean language when not using Chinese characters in the text. Still, Koreans do have homonym issues in their language, but the advantages of not using complex characters outweigh such problems.
As Korean who are trying to learn Japanese, I wish I knew more Hanja as that would make learning process much easier. But at the same time, I am glad that Hangul replaced 90% of Hanja usage in Korea, since I never have to question about "How to read this character".
@@marimarihosp3035 安倍 That’s irrelevant though. OP’s point essentially is, if hanja is still in use, they’d be able to read and understand what ”約束” or “家族” means, for example, since the characters use are the same both in hanja and kanji. And since the pronunciations in many cases are only slightly different, 약속 and 가족 here respectively, it’ll make it easier to associate the Japanese readings.
@@미아모레사나 Many Koreans believe that PM Abe was a descendant of Abe ( 阿部) Nobuyuki, Governor-General of Korea, 1944-1945. Too bad Koreans can't read wartime and postwar Korean newspapers. It's one of the reasons Koreans misunderstand history. For example: 동아일보 1946.3.17 - 徴用 (징용) 가서 "배워운" 技術 (기술) 祖国再建 (조국 재건) 의 産業 (산업) 에 動員 (동원) 技能別 (기능별) 로 配置 (배치)
The reason why Korea abandoned Hanja is that Korean alphabet called Hangul is extremely successful in terms of both readability and learning. Hanja is hard to learn and very difficult to type on computer keyboard. In addition, Hanja is so complex that it is inferior to Hangul in readability in small book. In ancient times, Asians wrote Hanja with brush in large size but now Hanja is printed in very small letter like alphabet. In that case, Hanja is hard to read.
Chinese script is hard to learn and requires a lot of memory space - I read and write Chinese. Chinese as a written language was restricted to the literary, government and ruling class. That’s why China had to simplify the written language for the common ppl to learn. It isn’t about size - the Japanese and Chinese still read it finely printed without problems. Even if you look at Han dynasty relics around 2000 years ago in Ancient China, they scribbled in very small prints to convey letters (paper wasn’t cheap back then and writing on bamboo strips restricted space). Japanese Heian period documents are also small print. So I’m not sure why you are bringing calligraphic issues to mind. Big sized characters used in calligraphy are often used to show brush writing mastery (yeah I do both Chinese and Japanese calligraphy).
@@user-hs1dd4tc7t I have myopia. You haven’t seen the ancient bamboo strips they wrote on. I can still read them. Some of those are far smaller than those written on A4 paper. There’re museums in China displaying those ancient strips known as Jiandu 簡牘. Those were used for centuries.
@@Omagatsuhi Traditional characters are still used in China though. Cantonese and Mandarin (Taiwan) still have them and common people have no issues with them. They're easier to learn compared to simplified characters, but they're more difficult to write.
Good content. One more thing I'd like to point out is that Japan failed dropping Kanji because the number of pronunciation which hiragana/katagana can cover is not many enough to enable them to distinguish homonyms.
I am learning japanese currently I can only say that only using Hiragana would be much more confusing to do, with Kanji plus Hiragana grammar is much easier to see. I can see a でした ending after a kanji and I immediately know, okay past tense
@@CharlieCharlie88Sadly Korean don't care about ancient history because throughout their history they were either conquered or enslaved by Chinese and Japanese. so, they want to get rid of old history and start new era by rewriting new history. Plus modern day S Korean are more developed than China as for now and that gives them feelings of superiority over anything Chinese.
@@zevil89 chinese texts like romance of three kingdoms are popular in Korea too! I read it when I was elementary schooler. Its not we dislike everything chinese, just current regime and nation.
I think anyone with a surface level knowledge of Korean and at least a mild depth in Japanese will immediately understand why each one has developed the way it has. Japanese, even if it adopted a phonetic syllabary like Korean, just doesn't feel quite functional without them due to the simplicity of its sounds and the massive number of homonyms. It's especially bad when you get into more technical matters, and you may even have to go out of your way to predefine "jargon" (for terms which often wouldn't even be considered jargon in other languages) if your listeners don't have a text visual and don't already have a good level of familiarity with the topic. Kanji may be annoying for beginners to learn to write, and even after many years of study, there are plenty of times you simply can't tell how something new is pronounced (especially place names and personal names), but without some massive change or crazy innovation coming along to redefine the language, Kanji will stay a practical necessity, and a very helpful tool.
To it’s credit, once you put in the heavy work to learn a good amount of it, kanji is VERY fast to read. You can get the gist of an entire sentence without even reading all of it because the meaning is evident without actually sounding out the words or even knowing their readings in some cases.
@@2yoyoyo1Unplugged True, the actual readings are surprisingly not that important when you're aiming for comprehension of a particular text! It's funny because sometimes I can translate things into English without actually being able to pronounce it in Japanese
I think the mixed script is cleaner and more understandable for the knowledgeable reader and writer. I'm really glad that the Japanese decided not to get rid of it in favor of romanji or pure kana. It would have lessened the clarity that Kanji allows for. It's hard to learn at times, but there's rarely any confusion about what is meant in written in Japanese because of that so it's perfectly reasonable to keep it around. Japanese written without kanji is just unpleasant and confusing even for natives as there's too much overlap in words to distinguish them clearly without Kanji or spoken pitch accent. I guess they could modify the hiragana itself to have a written form of pitch accent, but I can't see that catching on as they'd lose the ability to read their own laws and educational material by forgetting how to read kanji at this point.
I think part of the reason kanji stuck around while hanja didn't (for the most part) is that hangul is a bit more diverse than kana too. Reading a full hiragana sentence isn't just difficult to decipher without kanji, it's outright tiring. Kana, when in a giant block for a paragraph, start to look a little similar and really need the increased density of kanji to break it up visually.
You said the problem. You can forget how to read kanji. But you cant forget how to read an alphabetic or syllabic writing system. But I agree that japan will be stuck on this stupid writing system forever, because its cool to display and cultural significance.
@MaxineWashington Good point - that's one way of really showing the real number of homophones in the language (people often dismiss this with "English has this too" - no. It doesn't. It's like comparing a bucket of water to the ocean). BTW, for those who haven't actually used this input method on a PC or a phone - it sounds clumsy and difficult, but it's actually very fast an efficient, from the first time you try it, as long as you know enough Japanese to start with (just a little goes a long way). It's not slower than writing a Latin-based language. Not to mention the end result - I've compared the Japanese and English sections in user manuals, the Japanese one typically ends up with some 30% fewer pages.
Hangeul is just so much easier to learn. Chinese leaders thought about adopting simpler writing systems in the past with no success. Vietnam and Korea are the only two successfully switching out from Chinese characters.
상세한 이야기를 쓰기에는 내 영어 실력이 짧아 부득이하게 한글로 쓴다. 영상에서는, 일본에서 한자를 계속 쓸 수 있었던 것은 지식 수준이 높았기 때문이고 (한자를 잘 알아서), 한국에서 한자를 퇴출시켰던 것은 교육 수준이 낮았기 때문이라고 하는데 이런 헛소리가 다 있나. 애초에 질문이 틀렸다. "어째서 한국은 한자를 퇴출시킬 수 있었고, 일본은 퇴출시킬 수 없었는가?" 라고 물어야 한다. 이두니 향찰이니 길게 불필요한 소리를 늘어놓을 필요도 없다. 일본어는 한글에 비해서 음의 변화가 매우 적다. 단순비교로, 일본어는 50음이지만 한국어는 초성x중성x종성 조합이 가능하기 때문이다. 그러다보니 당연히 한자를 자국어 글자로 표현할 때 한글보다 히라가나가 훨씬 길어지고, 동음이의어가 많아진다. 이래서는 히라가나로만 글을 써 놓으면 글이 너무 길어지면서 동음이의어가 너무 많아져서 이해하기 힘들어지는 것이다. 반면에 한글은 한자 하나에 한글 한글자로 대응이 되기 때문에 불필요하게 길어지지 않고, 다양한 음의 표현이 가능하기 때문에 동음이의어도 일본어보다 훨씩 적게 나온다. 너무나도 간단하고 당연한 이유인데도 불구하고 제대로 알지도 못하는 외국인이 이러쿵저러쿵 왜곡하는 것을 보니 가당치도 않다. 그리고 또 한가지.... 한자는 한국이든 일본이든 예로부터 지식인이라고 하는 권력자들의 전유물이었다. 이미 15세기의 조선의 훈민정음 창제 목적에도 나와있듯이 문자와 정보가 권력자들에게 독점되지 않기를 바라는 것 또한 한자 퇴출의 이유인데, 그것을 퇴출한 한국이 교육 수준이 낮았기 때문이라는 개소리는 넌센스. 그리고 중국인들아, 한국인들이나 일본인들이 글을 쓸 때 한자를 넣고 안 넣고는 너희들 잘 알아보고 못 알아보고 하는 것은 전혀 고려하지 않은 것이다. 중국인들 입장에서 알아보기 쉽네 마네 할 필요는 없는 것이다. 자, 이 정도의 내용을 나는 한자 없이 한글로만 적었지만 한자가 없어서 읽기 힘들지 않다. 하지만 이 정도의 내용을 한자 없이 히라가나로만 적는다고 해보자. 아마도 눈깔 빠질걸?
5:15 "kanbun" just means classical chinese (generally speaking), I think the word you are looking for is kundoku also it's probably worth mentioning that movements to abolishing/simplifying characters were widespread across East Asia
Thanks for making this explanation. This is already my second time watching. I'm glad to see such a thoughtful take; usually, people find every rationalization possible for why Japan didn't drop kanji, except the true reasons that you point out here. I'm quite interested in how Japan would look today if they were never influenced by China; how would they write then?
@MaxineWashington Yes, it's probable that the Japanese today may not even be a modernized nation were it not for Chinese influence, and their language would be cardinally different, so Chinese-type writing would be an even poorer fit. It's difficult to speculate, but by all means they would still have a writing system, and one that I imagine would much resemble hiragana in character (Japanese would probably still be heavily syllable-oriented, even more so than now with the import of the moraic nasals rom China). By the way, there's an interesting theory that the Japanese didn't have any numerals above 20 before the Chinese arrived. はたち is the last uniquely-named numeral in Old Japanese, with later decades (30, 40, 50...) being formed with the そ suffix, but a certain professor wrote that he believes these numbers were barely used or thought about until Chinese mathematics and numeracy came to Japan. I personally don't believe this, though.
@@spaghettiking653 Every writing system on the planet originated from just four places: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient China, and Ancient Mesoamerica. So it would have been an impossibility for an independent language system to develop without the influence of one of these systems. And in the case of Japan, that would be Chinese. Hiragana is still based off of Chinese, so unless they somehow imported a language from a different part of the planet, they would still just be utilizing a variation of Chinese.
@@team3am149 I don't think you've understood what I mean - I'm saying specifically, "what if they never did borrow Chinese writing?". If so, at some point, the Japanese, like the Chinese, would have innovated their own writing, and I highly doubt it would have been a logographic system. Of course, their current writing is all a consequence of contact with Chinese, which means that this native writing system development could only have happened if Japan were never influenced by China at all, in other words I'm talking about a totally alternate history! :)
Just want to share something that for a native chinese speaker, we can read VERY FAST also we use subtitle a lot even for Chinese video, movie itself so that is a specail thing that you can see people on the train without airpods, turn on subtitle and watch your video on 2x speed.
Literacy rate is the determining factor in accepting the abolishment of Chinese characters and adopting a phonetic alphabet system. China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam all tried. Korea and Vietnam did it, China had the Pinyin, which were designed to replace Chinese characters. Also, Chinese characters are lime QR codes. They contain meanings and pronunciations and can be combined to build new concepts.
In Korean, words with the same meaning are mainly due to the use of Chinese borrowed words, and since the use of Chinese characters has been abandoned, the frequency of using such words has decreased and the need for Chinese characters is gradually disappearing as they are replaced by Korean words with the same meaning. Today's younger generation has no problems to reading and writing without knowing any Chinese characters.
I don't understand why you shamelessly brag about ongoing extinction and poorness of vocabulary of your own language elimination of hanja was a historical tragedy, and only nationalism explains the irrational extremist decision (as the language is deeply rooted in Chinese characters and its vocabulary)
@user-qf2mj9fy9y Oh boy! Nationalism? Look at your indecent expression. And look around your side, where you are in the digital world with glorious Kanji.
There's an error here 1:06. It should be 남자는 (男子는) not 남자은 because of phonotactics rules in Korean. Also, the verb 하다 can be translated from する as 해, which is an informal register, but a better translation would be 한다 which is a neutral/literary/quotative register.
Difference of 훈민정음 & its modern ver 한글 is that 훈민정음 is a bit more of a theoretic writing system. It was literally made on purpose rather than naturally developed. So it has some characteristics that doesn't really matter for actual pronounciation but only for aesthetic consistency or to show the word's chinese origin. But these were lost quite quickly, and now only the practical rules remain.
To provide phonetic symbol for Chinese letter was one of the main purpose when the 훈민정음 invented. This is why some pronunciations which do not exist in Korean language are exists in 훈민정음.
7:21 I also have a super interesting theory about why the character 果(Sino-Korean pronunciation 'kwa'과) may be used to represent the word '와' (and)! Because in Korean, the word 와(wa) actually has a variant form 과(kwa)! Both of them are native Korean words that have the same meaning of 'and', but the difference has to do with phonology, 'wa' is used when a word ends a vowel, and 'kwa' is used when a word ends with a consonant! So 'with a man' is 남자와(namja-wa) But 'with a student' is 학생과(haksaeng-kwa) So originally, the character 果 might have originally be used to just denote "kwa", but it might have been *phonologically extended* to also represent "wa" due to their similar meaning! This also reminds me of this parallel phenomenon with the Japanese word 御(go/o) "honorific prefix", where 'go' is used for Sino-Japanese words in honorific contexts, and 'o' is used for native Japanese words. And the Chinese character 御 doesn't have much to do with the Japanese prefix 'o', but is only used as a kind of extension to this Japanese honorific meaning, and it feels like a chicken or the egg scenario where I'm not sure if it's 'go'(which would be the Sino-Japanese reading for 御) that existed first and being used as an extension for 'o', or 'o' existing first. I think it's likely the latter where originally only native Japanese words have honorific prefixes, and then later a character needed to be used to represent 'o', and then later they decided to also use the on'yomi of 御(go) to do the same honorific inflection for Sino-Japanese characters.
Nice video on the topics, I also did some research a while back, truly fascinating especially for Taiwanese which learns Chinese with traditional characters.
Fantastic video, I was wondering this exact thing. I like the point that the lack of tones in Chinese loan words results in an unreasonable number of homophones. So kanji are really convenient if you have the education to support their use.
Chinese characters are like QR codes. Take the basic character 人. You can pronounce it in your native language. Ren in Mandarin Nin in Shanghainese Yaan in Cantonese Hito in Japanese Saram in Korean Man in Emglish Hombre in Spanish
One advantage of Chinese characters is they are able to convey meaning much more quickly You can glean the meaning of a text just by a quick glance, instead of having to parse the sounds represented by the alphabet and then converting those sounds into words and then meaning It's the same reason why emoji has gained popularity
@@Allin7days but in reality you won’t need to know every word, and in japanese if it’s a hard kanji sometimes they’ll just have furigana alongside the kanji. Even in chinese you don’t really need to know every single word, just the more common ones
If you speak an alphabetic language and you've learned to read properly, you don't have to sound out the letters. You immediately recognize the shape of the whole word and grasp its meaning without having to think about it.
Yes theoretically. However in reality it is not the case. A lot of Chinese characters are meaningless. Many were just made up especially to represent new things. You will be amazed by the Chinese used by young generations.
When we moved to Korea from the United States in 2019 my son went straight to 1st grade at a Korean school. he already knew some Korean because my wife is a native here. In Korean elementary school he had hanja classes, and he was the number 1 student in the class, much to the chagrin to many Korean parents, seeing a mixed western'Korean kid take the number one spot in class. Today he is in sixth gared at an American school in Korea but he still remembers a lot of hanja, and it helps him a lot when he reads mixed script he already knows a lot of the meaning. On a recent trip to Japan he was even able to understand some of the kanji there.
What is problematic is that every important Korean historical record, inscription, and tomb stone is in written in KANJI...but most modern Koreans cannot read them. De-sinicization of Korean peninsula (or detaching Korean peninsula from Chinese cultural and political sphere) was a deliberate Japanese policy after War with Qing Dynasty in 1894-1895. But we always imagined that Koreans would maintain a mixed-script because of their names, place names, titles, or vocab have KANJI meanings.
For homonyms, in Korea until recently it was common for papers to have parentheses with Hanja in it immediately following the word to make sure people understood what it means. But really, if Japanese had spaces in their sentences and they decided to drop all the kanji, it will be fine. People will adapt. Contexts are everything. People are not dumb enough to mistake for a word completely out there in terms of context. If anything it will save people from having to learn the different pronuncation of the same kanji.
@@vintageb8 Think of it as understanding and recognizing greek and latin roots in english. 90s kids have that down. 00s kids... don't really have it anymore and we are continuously phasing out older, hanja based words.
Thanks for the great video! As Korean who interest in other languages I want to add comment on the video. One of the main reasons for the decline of Hanja in Korea is the use of spacing. In Japanese, distinguishing words without Kanji is difficult because there is no spacing between words. In contrast, Korean widely uses spacing, making Hanja unnecessary. However, this comes with a drawback: mastering Korean spacing (띄어쓰기) can be quite challenging, and errors in spacing can lead to misunderstandings. Another perspective is that Hanja in modern Korean is similar to Latin and French in English. Knowing the original Latin or French roots of words can help in understanding and using them in academic writing. Similarly, understanding Hanja can aid in grasping the nuances of Korean vocabulary. For example, in English, knowing that "benevolent" comes from the Latin "bene" (well) and "volent" (wishing) helps in understanding its meaning as "wishing well." Similarly, in Korean, knowing that the word "경제" (economy) is derived from Hanja characters 經 (경, meaning "to manage") and 濟 (제, meaning "to relieve") provides deeper insight into its meaning.
You can write Japanese with spaces, kana-only texts use spaces, in a manner similar to Korean. Examples are books for small children, and software that cannot display kanji (like old video games or cash registers).
Thank you for sharing this great video! However, I'd like to discuss some points where I have a different perspective. The last part, which explains why Korea succeeded in dropping Chinese characters while Japan could not, appears to be somewhat off the mark. Nationalism alone may not be sufficient to explain this phenomenon, as both Japanese and Koreans have a strong sense of patriotism. Moreover, Japan has also had several attempts throughout its history to drop Chinese characters, but failed. We should focus on understanding why Koreans were able to drop Chinese characters right away compared to the Japanese. The key lies in the unique characteristics of Hangeul, which can create nearly 12,000 combinations of syllables with distinct pronunciations. In contrast, the Japanese language employs 41 letters to form words. This distinction is essential because, unlike the Chinese language, which uses intonations to differentiate sounds and meanings, the Japanese lack an alternative method apart from utilizing Chinese characters. Furthermore, your example of the word "수도" (sudo) in Korean proves my point. Unlike Chinese, where words often carry multiple meanings, "수도" only has two meanings. They have crafted words with different sounds and combinations to avoid homonyms. The Chinese-profoundly-using phenomenon in the Korean law field isn't also connected to homonyms. It's more closely tied to a social phenomenon where there's a deliberate effort to prevent ordinary people from learning or using legal terminology. Lawyers often employ esoteric words derived from old Chinese or Japanese, making them challenging for most Koreans to comprehend, even when written in the Korean script. This happens in many other countries, too. Plus, the Korean language has spaces between words that help distinguish words and particles while Japanese doesn't have spaces between words. So, if they don't use spaces or Chinese characters, it is very confusing to discern which characters represent words and which are particles. I respect your historical perspective, but I believe it's more about the functional, or inherent characteristics of these two languages.
Причина, почему мы бросили Ханджа - без него можно всё понять с помощью правила чтения и словообразования. Таким образом, мы не видим полезность использования Ханджа. Например, слово "잠자리". Есть два произношения и значения этого слова: либо jam ja ri, либо jam jja ri, как омонимы. Оно связано с словообразованием. Если берём другой пример - слова "난자" и "한자". В конце слога обоих слов ㄴ и следует сразу согласный ㅈ. Они должны произноситься одинаково, но второй слог в первом слове произносится как "자" - "ja", а во втором - "jja"
@@АлександрАлександров-щ7к8т Если бы Вы уже увидели какие-нибудь тексты, написанные современным корейским языком, Вы сразу заметили бы, что не ставят ханчу в скобки, тем более зумеры не изучают ханчу. В современных русских текстах ставят «ъ» после каждых согласных?
For me, I like Kanji/Chinese characters because it helps me read or comprehend what's written much faster. Because it's like looking at pictures instead of symbols. It takes long time for us to learn tho.
As a Taiwanese, I just want to say there is only three place still using Traditional Chinese which is Taiwan, Hongkong and Macao and yes, our childhood is quite hard because we have to learn all those complex characters But for me grown up, I am really happy about that we didn't abandon Traditional Chinese.
The decline in the use of Hanja in korean is not only due to nationalism. Korean has a spacing system that does not exist in Chinese and Japanese. Even if there are no hanja, the meaning can be distinguished through spacing. For this reason, Korean people would not have felt much inconvenience without hanja, and as a result, the use of hanja would have naturally decreased.
You can write Japanese with spaces, kana-only texts use spaces, in a manner similar to Korean. Examples are books for small children, and software that cannot display kanji (like old video games or cash registers).
나는 한국인이고 일본어를 배울 때 한국식으로 띄어쓰기를 넣어 공부하기도 했습니다. 더불어 한자를 어려워 했으므로 한자를 거의 쓰지않았는데 띄어쓰기 만으로도 많은 혼란이 사라진다는 것을 느꼈습니다. 한자는 모르는 단어를 보아도 그 뜻을 추측할 수 있다는 장점이 있지만 한국인들은 이미 한자를 몰라도 모르는 단어의 의미를 쉽게 추측할 수 있습니다. 예를들면 '고' 라는 한자는 '높다'라는 의미를 가지는데, 한국인들은 이 한자를 몰라도 '고'가 붙은 단어는 '높다'의 의미를 가지고 있다는 것을 많은 단어의 공통점으로부터 배우지 않아도 알고있습니다
One error to point out is that Koreans don't consider Hanja as a remnant of Japanese occupation. In fact, in the 90s, advocates of Hanja argued that Hanja should not be abandoned since it's become a part of Korean culture due to its use for almost 2000 years.
As a Japanese,a Korean learning beginner, Hanja-mixed sentences seen in super old documents are way easier to understand to me, since there's less need to reconstruct meanings from Hangeul which shows the sounds.btw.
요즘은 유튜브가 번역도 해주네요. 짧은 문장들로 쓸게요. 한국은 한자 학습을 줄이고 있어요. 개인적으로는 안타깝습니다. 독해력을 키우려면 어느 정도 한문을 알아야 한다는 입장이에요. 동음이의어가 한자로 구분되니까요. 한국 중국 일본은 한자 문화권이에요. 삼국의 오랜 관계로 한자로 된 단어도 많아요. 한국에서 이런 말을 하면 질타를 받기도 합니다. 😢 + thumnail만 보고 댓글을 썼습니다. 영상을 온전히 못 보았어요. 알고리즘을 따라 들어왔어요. 동아시아에 관심을 보여줘서 기뻤습니다.
I don’t agree with the last part of the video, where you said in Korea Chinese usage may come back. More and more Sino-Korean words (words borrowed from Chinese) are replaced by words borrowed from English. For example, 색 (color) is from Chinese character 色, but nowadays many people in Korea use 컬러 which sounds ‘color’ in Hangul, instead of 색. There are bunch of similar examples. Speaking Korean without English words is becoming extremely hard. That is also the case in more sophisticated areas. If you read modern academic journals in Korea, people writes English words in parentheses when there can be a confusion. This would have been Hanja back then. Language is like a living creature, I believe and it evolves every time. One way is by borrowing words from foreign countries mostly from culturally and politically powerful ones. Just like English had French influences. For Korean, this had been China for a long time, but now it is the USA. Words from Chinese have been around with us for long time, so they have been integrated to Korean more, but that does not mean those Chinese words are essential to Korean. Using more English words in Korean is more likely future IMO than going back to Hanja usage. After all, words from Chinese and English are both foreign words to Koreans. We can just substitute one out.
@@刘卫皇-v2j Yes that’s what I meant. We have been using a lot of loanwords from Chinese, but loanwords from English are becoming dominant and many of them replacing Chinese ones already.
@@user-irkdj248dkdollii I know this.Its normal cuz many new stuffs are created by European and American.But interestly ,the north one refused to adopt English words but Chinese.You know why
@@刘卫皇-v2j Yes but I am not only talking about new words. Chinese loanwords that have been used for a long time are being replaced by English words. And the speed is very fast. For North Koreans, you are a bit wrong. They try to use Korean words for new things. They try their best to avoid using any foreign language including Hanja. You know we have original Korean words that are not from any other countries, and NK promotes using those very much.
@@user-irkdj248dkdollii I see.But It seems like its hard to make new words only with Inherent words,especially these words to describe complex things .Like robot in north Korea is like kikae(机械)salam mixed with Chinese word and Inherent word.
Point is certain, that is, from the pre -Qin dynasty, there have been 4 times large -scale immigrants from Chinese Han people to enter the Japanese islands and Korean Peninsula, which have a profound impact on the historical trends of China and Japan and ( Korean Peninsula ). Focus on reference materials : Yayoi period (300 B.C. - A.D. 300) 彌生時代 Kofun period (300 - 645) 大和時代 Asuka Period (538-710 AD) (645 -710) 飛鳥時代 Nara period (710-794) 奈良時代 Heian period (794-1185) 平安時代 Chinese Han people's four large -scale immigrants enter the Japanese islands record : 1. Qin and Han Dynasty Qin Shihuang (秦始皇 259-210 BC) swept the six regions. In order to escape the war, the Chinese people fled to Japan in two ways: Some Chinese people crossed the sea from the Northeast to the Korean Peninsula to Japan. Japan. 2. During the Wei, Jin, Northern and Southern Dynasties (420 -589 BC) During the period of "Upheaval of the Five Barbarians 五胡亂華", in order to avoid the war, the Chinese people began a wave of migration to a large -scale migration around. Most of the fleeing Chinese finally went to Japan, forming the climax of immigration to Japan. The representative is Liu Azhi (劉阿知), the descendant of Emperor Han Xian(漢獻帝). 3. The Sui and Tang Dynasties (581-907 BC) Chinese Emperor send a large -scale Tang ambassador (they were Chinese )to Japan 倭, while China sent a large number of people and technology and culture to Japan (for Chinese lived in Japan) . Most of these people are monks or cultural scholars. They are left as required by the Chinese who lived in Japan because of the difficult sailing and welcomed by Japan. They often stay and lived in Japan . The representative is the monk Jianzhen(監真). 4. The Song (960-1279)and Ming dynasties(1368-1644) In the Yuan Dynasty, the Han people in the southern Song Dynasty broke their families. In order to avoid the war and kill, they moved to Japan one after another. The representative of this period was scholar of the Southern Song Dynasty - Lanxi Daolong(蘭溪道隆). * The sea between China and Japan is very dangerous. Therefore, the ship of ancient Chinese needs to pass through the peninsula (today in South Korea). It is safer to reach Japan. In addition, the ancient Japanese and Koreans could not enter China (nor could they communicate with the Chinese). Entering the Chinese city must require the Chinese Han identity certificate or pass certificate. Only Chinese talents in Japan can enter China. ***************************** In ancient China. Due to the escape or expansion of territorial reasons. There were many records of the Han people moved to the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese islands (including Okinawa). Establishing small countries and regimes on these islands (representing Chinese senior officials rather than emperor). In addition to the later period of Japan (because of the ocean). The Han regime on the Korean Peninsula has always been the ancient Chinese territory and the scope of direct jurisdiction (but sometimes it is similar to the different phenomenon of political opinions from the central government. It is similar to the situation in Taiwan and Hong Kong today. When the relationship between Taiwan and Hong Kong and the central government is bad. Sometimes they think they are independent countries or claim to be non -Chinese). The history of the establishment of a regime on the Korean Peninsula (Goguryeo, Baiji, Silla, Goryeo , Joseon). It is not the history of the Korean people. Instead, it is the history of the local regime of the Han people in northern China.These royal family and nobles are Chinese and descendants who move to the peninsula. They are wearing Han nationality clothing and using Chinese characters. They also claim to be the Han family. They are like Hong Kong and Macau and Taiwan. The Han people basically speak two Chinese languages (Chinese dialects+Chinese official language), one of the Han dialects that are lost. * There are more than 20 dialects in Chinese Han nationality. Only some civilians and slaves are indigenous people from the south of the peninsula (Koreans). This is very certain. (A large number of ancient Chinese tombs were unearthed on the 4/5 Korean Peninsula today. Han murals (depicting the lives of the Han people in the north), the fairy and god beast of the Han nationality.Han religion. Chinese character stone monument. Han Dynasty coins. ........... The southernmost part of the peninsula is unearthed in the original and backward Korean national life tools. It can be seen that the extremes of two different ethnic groups( Chinese VS Korean ) and different civilizations exist at the same time in the same period of the peninsula history.
I am an English speaker with additional fading knowledge on a couple European languages. On my trip to Taiwan and Japan I was sort of prepared with a pocket guide to Kanji and supplanted with listings of Katakana and Hiragana characters. I still recall one Kanji sign that kept repeating in the small guide -- they called it "Rice Paddy". A basis of dozens of words. Well, during my nearly 3 week stay in Osaka, I took a one day trip to Hiroshima. I was easily able to decode the destination "Hiroshima" on the train ticket, as it was printed in Katakana. However, on the return to Osaka, I was stumbled on something else, until I realized that ticket was printed in Hiragana. For my trip(s) to Korea, I did not find any use for my Kanji pocket guide. Now I see, why. Thank you!
As a mongolian, I am kinda glad we never adopted Chinese characters. Although our grammar is similar to korean and japanese, our phonetics with consonant clusters would make a silibary/logographic writing so hard, alphabetic writing is much more suitable. Cyrrilic works pretty well I think
Does "kabuk" mean "turtle" in Korean? Well, in Turkish "kabuk" is the word for "shell" (as in a turtle's shell, sea shell, snail shell) or various outer parts (peels of bananas, skins of oranges, scabs of wounds). This seems really interesting. There were even linguistic theories connecting Korean with Turkish (along with Turkic, Uralic, Mongolic languages and Japanese), so this is kinda intriguing for me.
**PLEASE READ BEFORE COMMENTING**
Yes, I know there are mistakes in my Korean, and that 道 means road and not 到.
If you see something wrong in the video or wish to throw in your two cents, feel free to leave a comment. Just make sure that the comment you’re leaving hasn’t already been made.
I’ll probably be 80 before I mistype 道 again.
❤❤
1:15 これは、韓国の一般市民の写真ではありません。
第二次世界大戦後、「西大門刑務所から釈放された政治犯たち」とその人たちを出迎えた「社会主義者たちの団体」を写した写真です。
1945年「国際報道」という雑誌に載った写真です。
「ソ連軍 歓迎」と書かれたプラカードを見てください。
そして「呂運亨」という人物を調べてください。
多くの韓国人たちには、この真実が伝わっていません。
反日・反米・反民主主義を止めて欲しい。
i don't know if someone already mentioned, but 5:13 it should be gugyeol in Korea and "Kundoku" in Japan. Kanbun just means classical chinese. Also, Korean gugyeol don't rearrange the order to read
@@TNTErick neither does Kundoku if I remember correctly, I just did it to show the mental process that happens when one reads it.
@@TrueSchwar Well what i mean is Korean Gugyeol reading of classical chinese, they dont add the ➀②レ things to manipulate word orders, instead, they just treat huge chunk of text as a verb and put the verb ending.
For example:
大學之道，在明明徳，在親民，在止於至善。
Japanese Kanbun Kundoku: 大學之道，在③明②明徳➀，在レ親レ民，在③止②於至善➀。
Actual reading order: 大學の道は、明徳を明らかにするに在り、民を親たにするに在り、至善に止まるに在り。
Korean Gugyeol Reading: 大學之道는, 在明明徳하며, 在親民하며, 在止於至善이니라.
imho the Gugyeol sounds like they just add the verb ending and the particles as verbal punctuations and no where near Korean language, while Kanbun Kundoku gives a much more colloquial (at the time it was translated) text by rearranging the characters using the Kundokuten (the ➀②レ markings indicating the reading precedence) as well as incorporating more flexible Rebus readings. Doing this, Japanese wisely merge the actual meaning of the sentence into the Classical Chinese text, and avoided the need of another paragraph for translation. Gugyeol on the other hand uses only loan pronunciations, and the Korean meaning is listed at the end of the CC text as another paragraph.
Japanese Reading taken from here: esdiscovery.jp/knowledge/classic/china/dai005.html
Korean Reading taken from here: encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0025709
As a Chinese who try to learn both Japanese and Korean, I must say Japanese is significantly easier due to the fact Japanese still uses Kanji.
pronunciation wise i think korean is easier, cuz wont mixed up with mandarin pronunciation
@@lisaishere0919 Korean pronunciation is closer to Chinese but Japanese are easier to learn
Woww but as non chinese speaker, korean is much more easier
I had the opposite experience. I speak Japanese, but took a little Chinese in college. I could easily read and understand most of the written Chinese, but I had extreme problems pronouncing it.
@@dhxx2905🤡
I've been learning Japanese for just over a year. I honestly have no need for it. I don't live in Japan, I don't work with Japanese people, I don't have any Japanese friends. I'm not even into anime or manga. People think I'm mad.
The reason I started is a bit dumb. My teenage daughter started and she wanted me to learn with her. When school got busy, she gave up, and I have become quite obsessed. I truly LOVE Kanji. I see tremendous beauty in them, as well as the internal logic. I know, I'm a nerd. That's ok, I admit it.
Fellow Kanji Nerd ✊
I‘m also close to 1 year of studying the language! I might be in Japan right now, but have no intention of ever living here after I return home. Still, I also became kinda obsessed with the language and hope to keep up this motivation for the next years coming!
素晴らしい👍
사연이 너무 귀엽습니다 한자는 철학글자입니다 한자에 담긴 의미를 이해하신다면 고대인들에게 존경심을 가지게 될겁니다 정말 아름다운 글자입니다
You dont need japanese.
I am a native Chinese speaker. When I travelled in Japan, I can understand meaning of their logo/restaurant menus/subway station names/library even I don't know how they pronounce in Japanese.
As an English speaker, when I travelled to Japan, I can understand the meaning of many advertisements and product names as I can read Katakana (mainly used for foreign loan words). Most of the time, you can guess the English meaning simply by reading the Katakana.
@@yvr2002rtw but that is unless you know how to read katakana? because a person without prior knowledge of katakana cannot understand it , whereas Mrdoleagle said even without prior knowledge of Japanese, Chinese people can read the word and understand what it means as it's in kanji(Chinese)
@@fourzonesable But as a CHinese,although we never have studier any words or prnonunce about Japan.Only by our CHinese characters frame,we can also read these thing.Don't forget.CHina is the cultural suzerain of East Asia.Many Japanese words originated in China,and Korea(Both contrys)'s grammar system is even derived from China, and their language cannot function without Chinese characters.
Excellent video! As a Korean, some errata:
0:33 Your Korean pronunciation is impressive, but 한자 is one of the exceptions-it’s pronounced as 한짜 (han-jja)
1:04 男子은 should be 男子는. Also, horizontal Korean writing uses the Latin period symbol (.), not the block-width open circle found in Chinese/Japanese (。︀).
3:13 사과 means apple, not fruit (과일).
3:45 내를 should be 나를.
4:01 Typo here-나가 사롸를 should be 내가 사과를.
6:33 The word 비록 is still used today.
7:23 Typo-형찰 should be 향찰.
9:22 Same as 1:04. Also the word for TV in Korean is 티비 (from TV), or the more dated 테레비 (from テレビ).
12:53 One interesting aspect of linguistic nationalism is the push for native Korean words and given names. Some names cannot be written in hanja, like 하늘 (sky) and 슬기 (wisdom).
13:17 수도 (水道) means a water system, not a drain. Also, one extremely common homonym for 수도 is missing from the video-capital city (首都). In fact, that and 水道 are the only two everyday meanings for 수도. (Aside: In linguistics classes, these hanja homonym examples tend to list all the rare, archaic and extinct meanings for added effect. In reality, most homonyms have only 2-3 accepted meanings.)
14:25 Same as 9:22.
Excellent comment too!
영어 엄청 잘 하시는데요. 전 한국어를 배우고 있는데 '한자'라고 말하면 상대방이 자주 못 알아들었던 것 같아요. 어쩐지 잘못 했던 것 같은데 한짜라고 발음해야 할 줄 몰랐네요~ 감사해요. ㅋㅋ
한국어에서도 세로쓰기､ 국한문혼용 쓸때는 보통 고리점 모점 씁니다｡
Nice video! But a few things to fix. (I'm Korean, and sorry for bad English 🤣)
03:47 "내가 과일을 먹어" & "나를 과일이 먹어". fruit is 과일 in Korean, while 사과 means apple.
04:08 "내가 과일을 먹어" (くだもの, fruit, is 과일 in Korean.)
06:20 I'm not sure if you are mentioning the modern Korean pronunciation of Hanja here. But if so, the pronunciation for 果 must be /kwa/, not /wa/.
07:23 "향찰".
09:36 "男子는 텔레비전을 봐." Actually we do not use "。" when writing Korean 한글. It is for Chinese and Japanese.
14:06 Yes, several years ago (and also when I was a little student), some Korean parents thought teaching Hanja to their children would help better understanding of language. And that is true; it really helps, I think. But the situation changes in recent years. Many parents in Korea have not actually learned Hanja themselves, and no more think learning Hanja is worth to invest time and cost. They have lived well enough without learning it! Now Korean schools do not teach much about Hanja to the students, reflecting this social change. So if you come to Korea now, you can find most little students do not know Hanja, except for a few easy and commonly used ones you mentioned in the video. Thus I think Hanja in Korean is actually going to be gradually disappeared, to which I personally a bit objective.
In historical mixed script “。” would be used no? Korea used Eastern style punctuation until Hangul exclusivity I’m pretty sure.
Also, has the Korean government given up on trying to implement more hanja education? I only found a few newspaper articles in English about the government attempting to add more classes and increase hanja in school as well protests against it. But the last of those articles was from 2015, with the article about rising hanja classes from 2017.
Yes, in the past "。" was also used in Korean, but only when we write vertically. If you write sentence horizontally (just like nowadays) you still have to use ".". I don't know why 😂
And about the education, I think I have to confess that I'm not talking with official articles or other official evidence. I'm not sure whether or not schools are totally GIVING UP teaching Hanja. But I'm quite certain that many Korean parents are not as passionated as parents were several years ago. When I was a little student, I could see a lot of private academic institute in streets, which teaches Hanja to students. And I used to go one of those institutes to learn Hanja, too, which means my parents were willing to pay money for it. But learning Hanja privately was not really common even at that time. Among my friends I can barely find one who can read or write Hanja. I heard that this is getting more serious now, and parents nowadays do not want their children "waste" their time learning Hanja. They would rather teach English or math to their children (seriously). This is why we cannot find many academic institutes teaching Hanja now. And it is definately true that most Korean students do not know much about Hanja. (Of course they know 大中小.)
Yeah I'm Korean too and I cad add my ideas about learning Chinese in Korea. Back in time, my parent's generation, learned Chinese and those were like core classes(or required classes). And back in my generation around early 2010s, Korea(or Korean government) didn't taught Chinese in public schools. But most parents in early 2010s thought Chinese were important to understanding the history of hangul(Korean) so the parents(I learned Chinese too when i was little) paid money for their studies in Chinese(Just like you guys mentioned before). Moreover in 2023, most kids in Korea don't even know hanja. Parents think it is waste of time because of the competitivity of schools and universities in South Korea made parents think, "It is worth learning classes about English, Math, Korean, Computer Sci." ..etc. I personally think that most Korean parents know learning hanja is better for understanding history of hangul and other benefits. But in reality, learning many subjects cost money and time, Korean parents just thinks Korean, English, Math subjects were just more important than any other world languages(or elective classes). But there are some parents who let their children learn Chinese because they have time, money, and have interest in learning world language. Unfortunately, some parents these days don't even know hanja, importance of hanja and the relationship between those two languages, and most importantly these parents don't even dare to think the cultural and other importance between hangul and hanja.
@@kevinkim2405중간중간 중국어라고 하신 부분이 있는데 전부 한자 얘기 아니에요?
애들이 한자를 많이 배우던 건 기억나는데, 중국어는 그렇게까지 많이들 배우지 않았던 것 같습니다.
제가 학교를 90~00년대에 다녀서 좀 다를 수는 있는데, 중국어의 인기는 일본어와 비슷하거나 조금 낮은 수준이었던 걸로 기억합니다.
parents in korea dont really care about chinese characters nowadays. I live here in daechidong and this place is know to be a like a seat of learning for private education. This place is real fired up in sedning their kids to english preschools. These preschools costs a hell lot but they do. They care no shnaps bout chinese. But they do bout english.
Also in Korea, people just kept buying newspapers with less Hanja more, because it is convenient to read, so financially it was more viable just to go for Hangul.
So true, hanja became a thing of the past among the younger generation in the 90s~00s, resulting in the dropping of hanja education in school and usage of hanja in official documents
My opinion on why the Koreans were able to drop Chinese characters:
Similar to roman characters, the Korean language can be combined to pronounce an extreme range of things that are not even used by Koreans. For example, 뷁 is a word that is pronounced Bwelk but would never be found in literature.
This is significantly different than Japanese that only has 70 different ways of pronunciation + the ん so they only have 140 ways of pronouncing things. Due to the limitations, there are a lot of words that are pronounced the same way, much more so than Korean. Hence why they created an entirely separate alphabet with the exact same pronunciation just to distinguish foreign words! This is why intonation is important in the Japanese language but not in Korean. It would cause a lot of confusion if the Japanese dropped Kanji from their language. First, they would have to invent a system for spacing between characters. Next, they would have to create intonation marks to differentiate between various words.
Koreans can always add Chinese characters next to it to detail what they are talking about. To Koreans, it is merely like the Roman language at this point. Good to know but not very useful outside of scholarly settings. Chinese characters were also something that the upper class or intellectuals used to boast their knowledge and had a pretentious lighting. My mother who went through the Korean school system in the 70s who was fully educated knows much less Chinese characters than me, a Korean-American who only learned Chinese characters by reading a lot of Chinese martial arts fiction. It was something that needed to be let go.
@@jhpjhun "First, they would have to invent a system for spacing between characters. " Oh.. you mean.. spaces?
@@user-ye6ty9ie8g Which sounds better/correct... "...would have to invent a system for spaces...", "would have to invent a system for spacing between characters". Thanks for trying
Great video! I really love the research and the way you presented all the information so clearly.
Speaking as Korean, there are many wrong points but I will point out something importants only.
1. Hangul is already widely used in Chosun dynasty among common people.
2. Literacy rate both Hanja and Hangul has increased even during Japanese occupation. Mostly due to modern school system. Yes Japanese tried to teach Japanese language, but there were also many efforts to teach hangul for preserving Korean culture.
3. We NEVER EVER consider hanja or chinese character as symbol of Japanese occupation. We used this letter for 2000 years, and we adopted it as part of our culture. How can 36 years of Japanese occupantion could change our perspective? Rather we saw it as cultural influence of China.
4. The main reason why Korea give away hanja is a) we could b) it is way easier for us to use only Hangul.
I don't feel Korean language specially have more homonyms than English. The example you given 수도 is mostly used only one case. The capital city. 4 example that you given are dead words. Hand knife is used as 손날 in modern days. Other 3 are I never heard of. They are not used in modern days. Drain 수도 is mostly conjugated with other words like 수돗물, 상수도, 하수도.
After invention of hangul, we always knew that it is way easier to learn or to use if we dropped the hanja. Do you ever feel difficult to speaking English because you don't know Latin? Knowing Latin will help you understand the meaning of the words, but it doesn't mean that you feel difficult to using English even if you don"t know it.
Then why we used hanja until 1980s? Partially because hanja was our official traditional writing system. Also partially by Japanese influence of mixing kanji with hirakana or katakana.
Then, public opinion of using only hangul got bigger, saying that dropping hanja from our writing system will make easier for writing and learing. But traditionalists opposed to it saying that hanja is part of our tradition and we will loose connection to it if we don't know hanja. And that is where NATIONALISM takes part. We could slience thoes traditionalists voices with nationalistic public opinion.
In conclusion, we dropped hanja because it was easier without it. Nationalism helped to slience who were oppose to it. It is NOT we dropped hanja by nationalistic motivation.
Think reasonably. It is our daliy base writings. If not using hanja created any kind of inconvinience, it could not be continued just by nationalistic morivation.
Homonyms? We can simply avoid them by choosing another words. For example both continuos winning and continous defeat is wrtten as 연패. This cam be confusing without hanja. But we can simply avoid it by using 연승 continous victory.
For my point of view the reason why Japan could not give away kanji are 3 things.
1) Japanese, their open syllables made them to have less phonetic banks than Korean which makes them to have way more homonyms.
2) Hiragana and Katakana have long history of using together with kanji which made them insepratable.
On the other hand hangul was relatively new, and its main purpose of creation is for thoes WHO DO NOT KNOW HANJA.
3) Koream hanja always have 1 syllable. On the other hand kanji is often 2 syllables. Makes sentences looks very long and less information conciseness if they don't use kanji.
Excellent comment mate!
Unlike Hanja that comes with both sound and meaning, I heard Hangul records only the sound, and easily causes confusion. One Korean lady told me, when a child is born, the child will be given "two names", one of them in Hanja.
@@yiqunyI think you misunderstood what she said. It is not that giving 2 names for a child.
There are 2 name origins in Korea. One is pure Korean name and another is hanja based name. It is like bibilical(hebrew) origin names, german origin names, latin origin names are coexsiting in English.
좋은 설명 감사합니다~
Good comment, but Japan was not interested in promoting the Korean language. Towards the end, they attempted to Japaneseize Korea and make it a complete Japanan, not just a colony.
If you want to study the Korean language in depth, learning hanja will help you study vocabulary. You can analyze the etymology of any vocabulary. However, most people don't need to learn hanja, just like Europeans don't memorize Latin vocabulary. Nowadays, Koreans who love to learn and study in the modern era use hanja as a tool to store memories. Hanja is an encoding system created by the ancients, which is useful for encoding and retrieving images on flashcards.
I memorized latin vocabulary
@@kriskitt Are you fluent? I want to eventually learn Latin as well...
I agree
你說啥呢？🫤
@@mchparity 「流暢？」「我也欲流暢」（我 漢語知識皆無）
This is very informative and helpful!
Amazing video! The visuals really supported the material instead of competing with or simply repeating it. So informative AND enjoyable!
I already knew a decent amount about the Japanese side of things but barely anything about the history of writing in Korea, so this was really interesting! A point I want to add is that IIRC Japanese has significantly more Sinitic-loanword homophones than Korean due to a simpler phonology and sound changes, so replacing kanji with hiragana would remove more information than replacing hanja with hangul - I don't know how much this made a historical difference in practice though.
Thanks!
Also, that is an interesting point, but while researching about Kanji abolition in Japan, most of the arguments against getting rid of kanji were cultural or historical. The loan word argument did exist, but didn’t become prevalent until later, when people started asking why the Japanese didn’t drop Kanji.
Loanwords match closer to Southern Chinese languages as Mandarin is a relatively new invention.
@@eb.3764 They came from Middle Chinese not modern Southern Chinese languages. Modern languages of Southern China also underwent their own sound changes, no current Chinese language is identical to Middle Chinese or Old Chinese.
@@eb.3764 Mandarin is not any newer than Southern Chinese languages, with the exception of Min Chinese which is a descendant of a sister of Middle Chinese.
@@Nemo_Anomthat may be true, but the other southern Chinese languages were definitely more conservative compared to Mandarin (Mandarin changed more)
Nice video, even with the few videos you've uploaded I'm delighted with the information in them, keep going ;)
A very interesting video, in particular the history.
As someone who learned Hiragana (and Katakana) a long time ago, long before I even had any thoughts of learning Japanese, I should find it easier to read Hiragana (children's books). But I don't. It's always been hard, and it still is. So, the paradox is that Kanji is a steep hill in the way of mastering reading (which, for me, is so essential to language learning), and yet - even with the subset I know, and with much more to learn, after years of this - as soon as I can read something with Kanji, everything is easier to read. The mix of Kanji with Hiragana providing the grammar (which is so very explicit in Japanese) makes it possible (as I wrote in another comment elsewhere) to see the structure of a sentence with just a glance. And that facilitates easy reading. If everything was written in Hiragana, as those aforementioned children's books, you have to parse every sentence sequentially. And of course run into homonyms all the time, and not seeing the difference between "words" and grammar etc.
And there you have it. Kanji makes it hard to learn to read, but it also makes reading so much easier.That's the paradox.
Very nice video. I hope later you can make a video regarding why Vietnamese dropped their usage of 漢字（hán tự or chữ nôm) as well
Just gonna drop this here
ua-cam.com/video/zI9AF7sj1Bk/v-deo.htmlsi=r7p-YiVREBc-6apf
at 4:21, "they just learn to read and write and speak Chinese." The "speak" part may not necessarily be true. Even the speech within the Chinese were extremely diverse and not intelligible. Additionally, despite Classic Chinese at first may really be the way how people speak, with time fleets and each dynasty crowned some different local languages to be the vernacular lingua franca of the whole nation, the speech of Chinese languages were diverging from the Classic Chinese. By the time when Hunminjeongeum was made, none of the Chinese, Korean, Japanese were actually speaking Classic Chinese, they just all learn this written language to transcript knowledge in paper forms. This is very much a paralog of Latin in the Europe, by certain time in the history, people don't know how to speak Latin really, but they all learn Latin as a writting language regardless of what their own verbal native languages are.
Very good analogy. Now the latin is actually dead, but Chinese is well and alive. The Koreans will learn hanja again I predict. Mother china preserves the Mongolian script as well in Inner Mongolia. Now the outer Mongolians are re-learning the traditional script after they switched to Cyrillic for 80 years. Uyghurs in China use Arabic scripts while their Turkic brothers in Turkey switched to Latin alphabetic. And I predict the Turkish will switch back to Arabic in the future.
As a foreigner learning Korean, I love hanja, and this was a very fascinating video.
Ironically, I think learning hanja makes learning Korean so much easier, and I wish more people would take the time to appreciate them. And actually they're pretty easy to understand and remember once you understand stroke order and how chinese characters are constructed.
Ikr hanja makes everything more easy to assimilate more Korean vocabulary, it helps a lot when you want to learn jap or Chinese afterward!!
Koreans spend their whole lives memorizing Chinese characters, but they were so angry that they abolished Chinese characters. Memorizing Chinese characters is never easy. It must take up a lifetime. If you memorize it, you forget it; if you memorize it, you forget it. To read people's names and place names, you need to memorize at least 5,000 characters. This is the minimum number. Even if you memorize 10,000 characters, there are still many characters you don't know.
@@Joe-mr3zw yes but once you get used to reading at least around 1000 characters you'll understand the beauty and efficiency of knowing how to read chinese characters. it helps us memorize new words and avoid confusion
@@Joe-mr3zw You can become quite proficient when you learn 3000-4000 漢字. This should be adequate for handling words and sentences in daily life, including office settings and reading daily news. Or are you suggesting that using Hanja in Korean is incomparable to using 漢字 in the Chinese language?
In English, you may not completely read news without any tools even you know 8000 words.
I have studied both Korean and Japanese and wondered these exact questions! Thank you for explaining.
great video! may i make a suggestion? in the future, talk about vietnamese. different of korean and japanese, they completely ditched chinese characters (hán tự) and adopted a latin-based script.
I’m currently doing research into that, and was gonna add a bit near the end about it. But there is a bit of a problem with finding western sources for ‘han van’ vs ‘chu nom’, as well as the whole issue with colonialism and how that played out with a power struggle between the emperor and the political elite (I may be misremembering that part, as it’s late and I’m very tried as i type this).
I think you can see why I didn’t include it in the video. I am planning on doing a video though, going over the history of writing in Vietnam. But might take a bit as I go through everything.
@@TrueSchwar Hán văn 漢文 is the Vietnamese term for Literary Chinese, Chinese characters themselves are called chữ Hán 字漢.
@@TrueSchwar If you have any questions about Vietnamese, I can help you.
@@nomnaday thank you for the offer, but it’s a bit late unfortunately as I’ve already made a video on Chu Nom and Chu Han. I don’t think I went into what Han van was in it.
If you want to watch it, it’s up on the channel. Feel free to correct me in it if I’ve said anything wrong.
I’ll definitely call upon your services though if I ever make a video about Vietnamese or Vietic writings again.
It is not a proud that vietnam gave up their country's letters. And even viet(far) nam(south from china). Your country name ethymology is colonial name.
Also korean has more complicated pronunciations, which helps them to identify the meaning of Chinese-loaned words. Japanese have less diversity in pronunciations, so there are too many homonyms that kanji is essential for understanding its meaning.
@@almost_Zombie i meant that there are a lot of kanjis that sound the same because there are less diverse in sounds. Korean hanjas usually have complicated pronunciations, so there is less possibility of homonyms existing.
I don't think that Korean has a lot of complicated pronunciations. In fact, just like the video stated, there are a ton of words that is pronounced the exact same.
Furthermore Koreans doesn't have a phonetical system as in Chinese. But the only thing that might help, is of course, the context itself. CMIIW :) Just my opinion
@@ivan_valerian Korean has more diverse pronunciations than Japanese at least.
There are quite a lot of words that sound same in Japanese but different in Korean actually.
That's a myth. When people speak they understand each other even with several homophones. No need for a special writing system just for that!
韓国人に違いない😂
One of my favorite things about Japanese is that people are so used to using three entirely different orthographies that they are happy to *add* even more whenever they want to. I have never encountered a language that is more happy to randomly insert other scripts in the middle of sentences than Japanese and I absolutely love it. Simplified Chinese characters? Yup! Latin characters? Sure. Hangeul? Eh, why not. Devanagari? Go ahead! Hebrew? Couldn't hurt. Random unicode characters? Great!
Japanese and people in Taiwan and Singapore still use traditional or what I would call classical Chinese characters. The communist simplified the script for political reasons, to show they are increasing literacy. A committee changed the language developed over millennia. That' is disgusting in my opinion.
@@brucemoose926
Stupid.
Traditional Chinese characters aren't ban in PRC .
CPC decision to have simplified characters as official written language was and is... due to pragmatism.
@@brucemoose926 "Disgusting in your opinion"... Please bother to learn more about Chinese history before you start making assumptions. The Chinese script was originally unified thousands of years ago due to political conquest. In the 19th and 20th century, the majority of China was illiterate due to poverty and lack of access to proper education - only the wealthy could afford to read. Simplifying the script made knowledge far more accessible to the masses. ALL languages change due to sociopolitical reasons and institutions in power.
The fact that I (Japanese) had to stop and think about what those three orthographies were shows how normal the system feels to us.
@@brucemoose926 A lot of the simplified characters are actually revived ancient versions. Outlier Linguistics has a lot of great information about the evolution of Han characters. If the history interests you, I highly recommend checking them out!
The video makes an optimistic conclusion about the use of Hanja, saying that Korea may use it again, but this is unlikely.
To the younger generation, this just seems like the complaints of older people.
Perhaps in the future, there will be more people who know Hanzi or Kanji than who know Hanja. Because if they don't learn a foreign language, it may become rare for Koreans to learn Chinese characters.
To be honest, these days, students say that it is better to invest that time in learning English than learning Chinese characters, and I think so too.
South Korean primary schools ceased the teaching of Hanja in elementary schools in the 1970s, although they are still taught as part of the mandatory curriculum in grade 6. They are taught in separate courses in South Korean high schools, separately from the normal Korean-language curriculum. Formal Hanja education begins in grade 7 (junior high school) and continues until graduation from senior high school in grade 12.
In South Korea, Hanja are used most frequently in ancient literature, legal documents, and scholarly monographs, where they often appear without the equivalent Hangul spelling. Usually, only those words with a specialized or ambiguous meaning are printed in Hanja. In mass-circulation books and magazines, Hanja are generally used rarely, and only to gloss words already spelled in Hangul when the meaning is ambiguous. Hanja are also often used in newspaper headlines as abbreviations or to eliminate ambiguity.
2:46 should it not be 道 rather than 到? They have the same pronunciation but 道 means "way/road" and 到 means "up to, to, until"
Ya…
In 2:58 you use 到 for road/way but it means arrive whereas maybe you are thinking of 道 which means road or way. Anyways great video!
Super awesome video!! Thank you! :)
I read that North Korea went to all-hangeul quickly because of nationalism while South Korea didn't shift until much later.
Very interesting and informative. As a kid I remember encountering a Korean book from the 50s or 60s and was surprised to see that it had many Chinese characters. I remember asking about it and looking it up, and learning about the existence of Hanja, but not much about why it was eventually phased out, or anything from its history or use in mixed script.
Immigrated to America in 2002 and l still have some hanja books that l used to learn in school in the late 90s early 00s
Hanja no Hanzi
13:50 Japanese has even MORE homonyms like this. Like... a TON. I think that, after you learn kanji, it is much easier to read Japanese than it is hiragana/katakana only. Interesting video, but I do wonder if it's really just nationalism in the end, and not partially practical.
Oh ya, Japanese has a lot of Homophones for sure. But the homophones don’t seem to be as big a problem in everyday spoken language as context is used, as well as a slightly different word choice from the written Language; and due to the nature of writing, the written language is more likely to contain archaic or literary words, which in turn artificially increases the number of homophones in a language, even if those words aren’t really used in speech all that often.
So I’d expect, if Japanese where to get rid of Kanji, very quickly, a lot of those homophones that can’t be differentiated based on context, would slowly fade away except in certain literary works, and writing as a whole would emulate the spoken language, at least in word choice. Basically it would follow the same path Korean took after it “abolished” hanja.
Finally about the nationalism. Ya, definitely not the only reason. History is complex with many things influencing certain events all the time. A main point of this video was to show a pretty big part of the discussion that often gets overlooked.
PS. Love your content
@@TrueSchwar Thanks!
Yeah I could see that. It would certainly make the language more accessible. With that said, the archaic words that fit many situations so perfectly would be sad to see go. So I, personally, hope kanji stays.
Would I HATE if it went? No. But I do find it fun. 😊
@@ToKiniAndy Kanji are great! In fact, my Japanese teacher told me to stop using Kanji that we haven’t already learned in class 😭
@@TrueSchwar 😆
"You can figure out homophones from context" works right up until a sign in a field that either says "landmines" or "carrots".
I'm an American living in Japan and learned Kanji along with vocabulary. I worked in international trade companies my whole life and never had a problem with reading. When I had my son I would read him children's books that were all Kana. My brain melted. It's so hard to read kana alone and follow along with what's being written. Kanji is essential.
This is actually not true. The Japanese created some simplistic system in the 90s that used only Hiragana and Katakana but had spaces between the words and it was very readable
@@starfox300 Yeah, I read it, it's terrible.
@@starfox300Kanji is that rare kind of thing where it's hard to master but the end product eventually outwheighs the deficits.
It's crazy how many kinds of unique expressions are possible with the 3 writting system model the japanese language has.
@@starfox300 It's not very readable, unfortunately. (And it wasn't invented in the 90's - it's always been there, at least since Hiragana was invented, and that's not exactly new).
Our house has many such books. They're for children. And they're hard to read. In Japan children learn that way, and then they learn Kanji all through school. I suspect that this isn't actually very efficient. Adults can learn Kanji much faster than that (it should be the other way around, as it is for everything else - language, for example. Or music notation, which you can learn quickly as a child, but adults have a horrible time learning it. But with efficient methods adults can learn Kanji must faster than Japanese children in Japanese schools - they keep learning all through high school. That should tell us that something is wrong here).
My wife teaches Japanese to (non-Japanese) children. There's no source material, so she creates everything herself (she has an educational background though), and, as part of that, just jumped straight ahead to incorporating Kanji when teaching the children to read and write. They absorbed it *easily*. I'm now convinced that this is the way to go - just learn the real stuff right away, don't waste years focusing on Hiragana/Katakana and slowly introducing Kanji one by one, the traditional way.. just dive right in.
@@makokx7063 It's not terrible it is VERY comprehensible. You do not need Kanji at all, just as when you speak to someone with your mouth, you cannot convey which Kanji you are using, but through the context the listener knows what you mean
Actually, Korea had their own version of simplified syllabus & scripts just like Katakana called Idu and used until creation of Hangul script. So they have used classical Hanja scripts along with Idu for reading, usually not used in official documents as these were handled by highly educated elite literati's of upper class Koreans.
Whats does idu mean?
500년 전 사람에게 물어보세요
@@jasonpark6381이두(吏讀) means like Initial characters used by the government officers. And it was developed in 7th century.
Idu is mentioned in the video tho…
You didn't even get halfway through the video before assuming that it was never going to address this and commenting. 6:10 is where Idu gets explained.
Nice work ❤❤ but 2:58 the third Chinese character 到(road, way)should be道(road, way), 到itself actually acts as a verb meaning “get to, reach”
Imagine if Emperor Meiji had ordered Japan to adopt the Latin alphabet in the 1800s. That's just about the only way Kanji could have been abolished. I think the effect of low vs high literacy rates on education policy and standardisation before and after key turning points like WW2 is a key observation from this video.
Umm no given how many homophones Japanese have it would be even harder to replace Kanji with romanisation, it would be easier to use pure kana, except of course it would still be confusing lol
My favorite alternative history scenario is one where instead of banning Christianity and closing the country for 200 years, Japan converted to Christianity in its entirety.
@@EgnachHelton yikes
明治天皇は独裁者じゃないし、そもそも何のメリットもない。
That would require Someone taking over and replacing the Emperor and the Shogunate@@EgnachHelton
I heard that some Japanese, especially young people, are playing with the "fake Chinese" （伪中国语）, which uses kanji only.
They even tried to communicate with Chinese using that, of cause it leads to some misunderstandings, but works most of the time.
我可能理解你的文章！(偽中国語)
@@ZEKESasaMothis actually could be counted as some sort of authentic Chinese.
@@langhsichang Chinese is a SVO language whereas Japanese operates in SOV, so “fake Chinese” would be something like using all Chinese characters but using Japanese sentence structure: 我，你的文章理解可能。
@@lamlam-bw7ev that's interesting. But in oral Chinese, we won't strictly follow the svo structure. Take the "I might understand your writing" for example, it could go as "你的文章我能理解", that's for Chinese being highly parataxis, which makes wrong sentences right once you can make yourself understood.
什么 君no日本語當上手
Its amazing how accurate your thoughts are to what native speakers think about their language. Source: Im Chinese and interested in learning Japanese.
As someone who knows a bit of Japanese, I dread texts that are in pure kana, such as you’d find in old video games. Pure kana is difficult to understand, because I can never be sure of a word’s meaning without seeing the kanji. I’m happy that Japanese kept kanji around.
So you don't understand spoken Japanese at all?
@@HuntedCupCake I’m weaker there, yes. But I see your point.
Plus it's too overwhelming to read. Kanji (and katakana) provides balance for the writing/reading
@@ankokunokayoubi I agree. It’s so much more pleasant to read a text with kanji in it.
In my experience as a Chinese learning Japanese, reading やまとことば aka pure native Japanese words in pure kana isn’t that difficult, even for long words like いちじるしい or まぎらわしい, but I dread reading 漢語 (Chinese loanwords) without kanji, especially during a time sensitive environment like during the tests.
Thank you for using more than one fonts for Korean. I deeply appreciate that :)
13:51 su-do is not used for "hand knife" "tunnel" "prisoner" ever. so those are not the problem.
but su-do can also mean "capital city", which is a commonly used word.
I'm South Korean. I'm surprised because your pronunciation of Korean and Japanese is very precise and analysis is thorough. keep up the good work!
Another reason would be the number of sound variations between the two languages. There are not many consonants and vowels in the Japanese language, while there are a lot more variations in the Korean language. Accordingly, compared to the Japanese language, there would be a lot fewer homonym issues in the Korean language when not using Chinese characters in the text. Still, Koreans do have homonym issues in their language, but the advantages of not using complex characters outweigh such problems.
As Korean who are trying to learn Japanese, I wish I knew more Hanja as that would make learning process much easier.
But at the same time, I am glad that Hangul replaced 90% of Hanja usage in Korea, since I never have to question about "How to read this character".
阿倍／阿陪／阿部／阿閉／阿辺／阿邊／阿邉／安倍／安陪／安部／安辺／安邊／安邉
Which one is former prime minister Abe's kanji？ They are all pronounced Abe.
把拼写读音当作文字，导致发音相似只会带来更多的误解。
@@marimarihosp3035 安倍
That’s irrelevant though. OP’s point essentially is, if hanja is still in use, they’d be able to read and understand what ”約束” or “家族” means, for example, since the characters use are the same both in hanja and kanji.
And since the pronunciations in many cases are only slightly different, 약속 and 가족 here respectively, it’ll make it easier to associate the Japanese readings.
@@미아모레사나
Many Koreans believe that PM Abe was a descendant of Abe ( 阿部) Nobuyuki, Governor-General of Korea, 1944-1945.
Too bad Koreans can't read wartime and postwar Korean newspapers. It's one of the reasons Koreans misunderstand history.
For example:
동아일보 1946.3.17 -
徴用 (징용) 가서 "배워운" 技術 (기술) 祖国再建 (조국 재건) 의 産業 (산업) 에 動員 (동원) 技能別 (기능별) 로 配置 (배치)
@@marimarihosp3035 Again, that’s irrelevant to what they said.
The reason why Korea abandoned Hanja is that Korean alphabet called Hangul is extremely successful in terms of both readability and learning. Hanja is hard to learn and very difficult to type on computer keyboard. In addition, Hanja is so complex that it is inferior to Hangul in readability in small book. In ancient times, Asians wrote Hanja with brush in large size but now Hanja is printed in very small letter like alphabet. In that case, Hanja is hard to read.
Chinese script is hard to learn and requires a lot of memory space - I read and write Chinese. Chinese as a written language was restricted to the literary, government and ruling class. That’s why China had to simplify the written language for the common ppl to learn. It isn’t about size - the Japanese and Chinese still read it finely printed without problems. Even if you look at Han dynasty relics around 2000 years ago in Ancient China, they scribbled in very small prints to convey letters (paper wasn’t cheap back then and writing on bamboo strips restricted space). Japanese Heian period documents are also small print. So I’m not sure why you are bringing calligraphic issues to mind. Big sized characters used in calligraphy are often used to show brush writing mastery (yeah I do both Chinese and Japanese calligraphy).
@@Omagatsuhitell that to someone with myopia
@@user-hs1dd4tc7t I have myopia. You haven’t seen the ancient bamboo strips they wrote on. I can still read them. Some of those are far smaller than those written on A4 paper. There’re museums in China displaying those ancient strips known as Jiandu 簡牘. Those were used for centuries.
@@Omagatsuhi Traditional characters are still used in China though. Cantonese and Mandarin (Taiwan) still have them and common people have no issues with them. They're easier to learn compared to simplified characters, but they're more difficult to write.
Amazing video! It deserves WAY more views and likes. Very underrated
1:15 1945年「国際報道」という雑誌に載った写真です。
第二次世界大戦後に「朝鮮の西大門刑務所から釈放された政治犯たち」と、彼らを出迎えた「社会主義者たちの団体」の写真です。
「建国準備委員会」という名前の団体で、代表者は「呂 運亨」です。
彼らは「ソ連軍 歓迎」と書かれたプラカードを持っています。
しかし、実際に朝鮮に駐留したのは「アメリカ軍」でした。
소련이 조선반도에 미군보다 더 빨리 들어왔기 때문에 소련군 환영이라고 한 것.
Good content. One more thing I'd like to point out is that Japan failed dropping Kanji because the number of pronunciation which hiragana/katagana can cover is not many enough to enable them to distinguish homonyms.
He did mention that. But if desired a system could be developed.
Korean still use hanja in historical books and law books, this would be a disaster for average students to study.
I think about this weekly
I am learning japanese currently I can only say that only using Hiragana would be much more confusing to do, with Kanji plus Hiragana grammar is much easier to see. I can see a でした ending after a kanji and I immediately know, okay past tense
thank you for this lovely video
As a korean I am just glad they dropped hanja. You don't really need it to understand things and scripts are easy to read without them.
Were Kanja not abolished, you would say that you are glad they kept Hanja because of its historical significance
@@CharlieCharlie88wellmaybe, but what does it matter? History does not accept ifs
@@CharlieCharlie88Sadly Korean don't care about ancient history because throughout their history they were either conquered or enslaved by Chinese and Japanese. so, they want to get rid of old history and start new era by rewriting new history. Plus modern day S Korean are more developed than China as for now and that gives them feelings of superiority over anything Chinese.
@@zevil89 chinese texts like romance of three kingdoms are popular in Korea too! I read it when I was elementary schooler. Its not we dislike everything chinese, just current regime and nation.
@@CharlieCharlie88 I wouldn't. I would have wrote how frustrating it is to learn thousands of letters lol
I think anyone with a surface level knowledge of Korean and at least a mild depth in Japanese will immediately understand why each one has developed the way it has.
Japanese, even if it adopted a phonetic syllabary like Korean, just doesn't feel quite functional without them due to the simplicity of its sounds and the massive number of homonyms. It's especially bad when you get into more technical matters, and you may even have to go out of your way to predefine "jargon" (for terms which often wouldn't even be considered jargon in other languages) if your listeners don't have a text visual and don't already have a good level of familiarity with the topic.
Kanji may be annoying for beginners to learn to write, and even after many years of study, there are plenty of times you simply can't tell how something new is pronounced (especially place names and personal names), but without some massive change or crazy innovation coming along to redefine the language, Kanji will stay a practical necessity, and a very helpful tool.
To it’s credit, once you put in the heavy work to learn a good amount of it, kanji is VERY fast to read. You can get the gist of an entire sentence without even reading all of it because the meaning is evident without actually sounding out the words or even knowing their readings in some cases.
@@2yoyoyo1Unplugged True, the actual readings are surprisingly not that important when you're aiming for comprehension of a particular text! It's funny because sometimes I can translate things into English without actually being able to pronounce it in Japanese
This video was fascinating!
I think the mixed script is cleaner and more understandable for the knowledgeable reader and writer. I'm really glad that the Japanese decided not to get rid of it in favor of romanji or pure kana. It would have lessened the clarity that Kanji allows for. It's hard to learn at times, but there's rarely any confusion about what is meant in written in Japanese because of that so it's perfectly reasonable to keep it around. Japanese written without kanji is just unpleasant and confusing even for natives as there's too much overlap in words to distinguish them clearly without Kanji or spoken pitch accent. I guess they could modify the hiragana itself to have a written form of pitch accent, but I can't see that catching on as they'd lose the ability to read their own laws and educational material by forgetting how to read kanji at this point.
Well, I doubt the script is necessary strictly-speaking.
I think part of the reason kanji stuck around while hanja didn't (for the most part) is that hangul is a bit more diverse than kana too. Reading a full hiragana sentence isn't just difficult to decipher without kanji, it's outright tiring. Kana, when in a giant block for a paragraph, start to look a little similar and really need the increased density of kanji to break it up visually.
You said the problem. You can forget how to read kanji. But you cant forget how to read an alphabetic or syllabic writing system. But I agree that japan will be stuck on this stupid writing system forever, because its cool to display and cultural significance.
@@arnelarboleda2870People who are too eager to call something as culturally significant as kanji may not be very smart themselves.
@MaxineWashington Good point - that's one way of really showing the real number of homophones in the language (people often dismiss this with "English has this too" - no. It doesn't. It's like comparing a bucket of water to the ocean).
BTW, for those who haven't actually used this input method on a PC or a phone - it sounds clumsy and difficult, but it's actually very fast an efficient, from the first time you try it, as long as you know enough Japanese to start with (just a little goes a long way). It's not slower than writing a Latin-based language. Not to mention the end result - I've compared the Japanese and English sections in user manuals, the Japanese one typically ends up with some 30% fewer pages.
Hangeul is just so much easier to learn. Chinese leaders thought about adopting simpler writing systems in the past with no success. Vietnam and Korea are the only two successfully switching out from Chinese characters.
상세한 이야기를 쓰기에는 내 영어 실력이 짧아 부득이하게 한글로 쓴다.
영상에서는, 일본에서 한자를 계속 쓸 수 있었던 것은 지식 수준이 높았기 때문이고 (한자를 잘 알아서), 한국에서 한자를 퇴출시켰던 것은 교육 수준이 낮았기 때문이라고 하는데 이런 헛소리가 다 있나. 애초에 질문이 틀렸다. "어째서 한국은 한자를 퇴출시킬 수 있었고, 일본은 퇴출시킬 수 없었는가?" 라고 물어야 한다. 이두니 향찰이니 길게 불필요한 소리를 늘어놓을 필요도 없다. 일본어는 한글에 비해서 음의 변화가 매우 적다. 단순비교로, 일본어는 50음이지만 한국어는 초성x중성x종성 조합이 가능하기 때문이다. 그러다보니 당연히 한자를 자국어 글자로 표현할 때 한글보다 히라가나가 훨씬 길어지고, 동음이의어가 많아진다. 이래서는 히라가나로만 글을 써 놓으면 글이 너무 길어지면서 동음이의어가 너무 많아져서 이해하기 힘들어지는 것이다. 반면에 한글은 한자 하나에 한글 한글자로 대응이 되기 때문에 불필요하게 길어지지 않고, 다양한 음의 표현이 가능하기 때문에 동음이의어도 일본어보다 훨씩 적게 나온다. 너무나도 간단하고 당연한 이유인데도 불구하고 제대로 알지도 못하는 외국인이 이러쿵저러쿵 왜곡하는 것을 보니 가당치도 않다. 그리고 또 한가지.... 한자는 한국이든 일본이든 예로부터 지식인이라고 하는 권력자들의 전유물이었다. 이미 15세기의 조선의 훈민정음 창제 목적에도 나와있듯이 문자와 정보가 권력자들에게 독점되지 않기를 바라는 것 또한 한자 퇴출의 이유인데, 그것을 퇴출한 한국이 교육 수준이 낮았기 때문이라는 개소리는 넌센스.
그리고 중국인들아, 한국인들이나 일본인들이 글을 쓸 때 한자를 넣고 안 넣고는 너희들 잘 알아보고 못 알아보고 하는 것은 전혀 고려하지 않은 것이다. 중국인들 입장에서 알아보기 쉽네 마네 할 필요는 없는 것이다.
자, 이 정도의 내용을 나는 한자 없이 한글로만 적었지만 한자가 없어서 읽기 힘들지 않다. 하지만 이 정도의 내용을 한자 없이 히라가나로만 적는다고 해보자. 아마도 눈깔 빠질걸?
네.. 저도 정확한 이해 없이 만든 영상이라는 생각이 드네요!
한국에 대해 아무것도 모르는 사람이 이거 보면서
"어 그렇구나" 할 거 생각하니 소름...
첫문장만 히라가나로 쓴다면…
しょうさいなはなしをかくにはじぶんのえいごのじつりょくがたりなくてしかたなくハングルでかく。
벌써 눈깔 빠지겠네 ㅋㅋ
@@falcon9ft710 私は日本人ですが、質問があります。
朝鮮人は訓民正音ができる以前の資料を読解するときには、どうするのですか？
漢字がたくさん使われていますが、読めるのですか？
@schwar Why no response eh?
@@falcon9ft710 ハングルは、表音文字だよね、
日本語では、漢字で、曖昧さ回避するけど、韓国語は、どうしてるんだろう？
really great video!
5:15 "kanbun" just means classical chinese (generally speaking), I think the word you are looking for is kundoku
also it's probably worth mentioning that movements to abolishing/simplifying characters were widespread across East Asia
Thanks for making this explanation. This is already my second time watching. I'm glad to see such a thoughtful take; usually, people find every rationalization possible for why Japan didn't drop kanji, except the true reasons that you point out here. I'm quite interested in how Japan would look today if they were never influenced by China; how would they write then?
@MaxineWashington Yes, it's probable that the Japanese today may not even be a modernized nation were it not for Chinese influence, and their language would be cardinally different, so Chinese-type writing would be an even poorer fit. It's difficult to speculate, but by all means they would still have a writing system, and one that I imagine would much resemble hiragana in character (Japanese would probably still be heavily syllable-oriented, even more so than now with the import of the moraic nasals rom China). By the way, there's an interesting theory that the Japanese didn't have any numerals above 20 before the Chinese arrived. はたち is the last uniquely-named numeral in Old Japanese, with later decades (30, 40, 50...) being formed with the そ suffix, but a certain professor wrote that he believes these numbers were barely used or thought about until Chinese mathematics and numeracy came to Japan. I personally don't believe this, though.
@@spaghettiking653 Every writing system on the planet originated from just four places: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient China, and Ancient Mesoamerica. So it would have been an impossibility for an independent language system to develop without the influence of one of these systems. And in the case of Japan, that would be Chinese. Hiragana is still based off of Chinese, so unless they somehow imported a language from a different part of the planet, they would still just be utilizing a variation of Chinese.
@@team3am149 I don't think you've understood what I mean - I'm saying specifically, "what if they never did borrow Chinese writing?". If so, at some point, the Japanese, like the Chinese, would have innovated their own writing, and I highly doubt it would have been a logographic system. Of course, their current writing is all a consequence of contact with Chinese, which means that this native writing system development could only have happened if Japan were never influenced by China at all, in other words I'm talking about a totally alternate history! :)
I'm korean and this video is rly interesting. You even knew things I didn't learn or realized lol
Just want to share something that for a native chinese speaker, we can read VERY FAST also we use subtitle a lot even for Chinese video, movie itself
so that is a specail thing that you can see people on the train without airpods, turn on subtitle and watch your video on 2x speed.
This was incredibly interesting!
Literacy rate is the determining factor in accepting the abolishment of Chinese characters and adopting a phonetic alphabet system. China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam all tried. Korea and Vietnam did it, China had the Pinyin, which were designed to replace Chinese characters.
Also, Chinese characters are lime QR codes. They contain meanings and pronunciations and can be combined to build new concepts.
In Korean, words with the same meaning are mainly due to the use of Chinese borrowed words, and since the use of Chinese characters has been abandoned, the frequency of using such words has decreased and the need for Chinese characters is gradually disappearing as they are replaced by Korean words with the same meaning. Today's younger generation has no problems to reading and writing without knowing any Chinese characters.
I don't understand why you shamelessly brag about ongoing extinction and poorness of vocabulary of your own language
elimination of hanja was a historical tragedy, and only nationalism explains the irrational extremist decision (as the language is deeply rooted in Chinese characters and its vocabulary)
@user-qf2mj9fy9y Oh boy! Nationalism?
Look at your indecent expression.
And look around your side, where you are in the digital world with glorious Kanji.
@@infrared_
現代日本人にとって、日本の古文書の漢字は難しくない。
漢字よりも｢ひらがな｣の方が難しい。
なぜなら、今では使わない文字だからだ。
@@infrared_
ua-cam.com/video/B_ghiSZwA00/v-deo.htmlsi=XsLFtpqn5Oo1_GE5
@@tinanag0한글은 일본어보다 더많은 발음이 가능하며, 배워야 할 문자도 적다. 그래서 한자폐지에 매우 성공할 수 있었던거다. 솔직히 일본어는 동음이의어가 많고, 히라가나는 가독성도 떨어지고 자리차지를 너무 많이해서 한자를 쓰는거지. 안그래?
10:24 as a chinese person trying to learn japanese i thank these people immensely for their contribution to my personal convienence
There's an error here 1:06. It should be 남자는 (男子는) not 남자은 because of phonotactics rules in Korean. Also, the verb 하다 can be translated from する as 해, which is an informal register, but a better translation would be 한다 which is a neutral/literary/quotative register.
I really appreciate the king of Korean that created the own script for his people and have own identity script ❤
Difference of 훈민정음 & its modern ver 한글 is that 훈민정음 is a bit more of a theoretic writing system. It was literally made on purpose rather than naturally developed. So it has some characteristics that doesn't really matter for actual pronounciation but only for aesthetic consistency or to show the word's chinese origin. But these were lost quite quickly, and now only the practical rules remain.
To provide phonetic symbol for Chinese letter was one of the main purpose when the 훈민정음 invented. This is why some pronunciations which do not exist in Korean language are exists in 훈민정음.
Super interesting, I had no idea these were standardized only so recently!
7:21 I also have a super interesting theory about why the character 果(Sino-Korean pronunciation 'kwa'과) may be used to represent the word '와' (and)! Because in Korean, the word 와(wa) actually has a variant form 과(kwa)! Both of them are native Korean words that have the same meaning of 'and', but the difference has to do with phonology, 'wa' is used when a word ends a vowel, and 'kwa' is used when a word ends with a consonant!
So 'with a man' is 남자와(namja-wa)
But 'with a student' is 학생과(haksaeng-kwa)
So originally, the character 果 might have originally be used to just denote "kwa", but it might have been *phonologically extended* to also represent "wa" due to their similar meaning!
This also reminds me of this parallel phenomenon with the Japanese word 御(go/o) "honorific prefix", where 'go' is used for Sino-Japanese words in honorific contexts, and 'o' is used for native Japanese words. And the Chinese character 御 doesn't have much to do with the Japanese prefix 'o', but is only used as a kind of extension to this Japanese honorific meaning, and it feels like a chicken or the egg scenario where I'm not sure if it's 'go'(which would be the Sino-Japanese reading for 御) that existed first and being used as an extension for 'o', or 'o' existing first. I think it's likely the latter where originally only native Japanese words have honorific prefixes, and then later a character needed to be used to represent 'o', and then later they decided to also use the on'yomi of 御(go) to do the same honorific inflection for Sino-Japanese characters.
Nice video!
Thank you for your nice video 😊
masterpiece
Biggest factor, Japanese without Kanji just looks awful and actually way harder to read
Nice video on the topics, I also did some research a while back, truly fascinating especially for Taiwanese which learns Chinese with traditional characters.
Fantastic video, I was wondering this exact thing. I like the point that the lack of tones in Chinese loan words results in an unreasonable number of homophones. So kanji are really convenient if you have the education to support their use.
Chinese characters are like QR codes. Take the basic character 人. You can pronounce it in your native language.
Ren in Mandarin
Nin in Shanghainese
Yaan in Cantonese
Hito in Japanese
Saram in Korean
Man in Emglish
Hombre in Spanish
One advantage of Chinese characters is they are able to convey meaning much more quickly
You can glean the meaning of a text just by a quick glance, instead of having to parse the sounds represented by the alphabet and then converting those sounds into words and then meaning
It's the same reason why emoji has gained popularity
this makes so much sense. i can read chinese so much quicker
...only if you remember every words, which is impossible even for professional scholars.
@@Allin7days but in reality you won’t need to know every word, and in japanese if it’s a hard kanji sometimes they’ll just have furigana alongside the kanji. Even in chinese you don’t really need to know every single word, just the more common ones
If you speak an alphabetic language and you've learned to read properly, you don't have to sound out the letters. You immediately recognize the shape of the whole word and grasp its meaning without having to think about it.
Yes theoretically. However in reality it is not the case. A lot of Chinese characters are meaningless. Many were just made up especially to represent new things. You will be amazed by the Chinese used by young generations.
When we moved to Korea from the United States in 2019 my son went straight to 1st grade at a Korean school. he already knew some Korean because my wife is a native here. In Korean elementary school he had hanja classes, and he was the number 1 student in the class, much to the chagrin to many Korean parents, seeing a mixed western'Korean kid take the number one spot in class. Today he is in sixth gared at an American school in Korea but he still remembers a lot of hanja, and it helps him a lot when he reads mixed script he already knows a lot of the meaning. On a recent trip to Japan he was even able to understand some of the kanji there.
What is problematic is that every important Korean historical record, inscription, and tomb stone is in written in KANJI...but most modern Koreans cannot read them. De-sinicization of Korean peninsula (or detaching Korean peninsula from Chinese cultural and political sphere) was a deliberate Japanese policy after War with Qing Dynasty in 1894-1895. But we always imagined that Koreans would maintain a mixed-script because of their names, place names, titles, or vocab have KANJI meanings.
For homonyms, in Korea until recently it was common for papers to have parentheses with Hanja in it immediately following the word to make sure people understood what it means.
But really, if Japanese had spaces in their sentences and they decided to drop all the kanji, it will be fine. People will adapt. Contexts are everything.
People are not dumb enough to mistake for a word completely out there in terms of context.
If anything it will save people from having to learn the different pronuncation of the same kanji.
so what happens now that they no longer able to read hanja?
No, Japanese is completely different. There are too many homophones in Japanese.spaces cant be work.
@@vintageb8 Think of it as understanding and recognizing greek and latin roots in english. 90s kids have that down. 00s kids... don't really have it anymore and we are continuously phasing out older, hanja based words.
@@hollowmusicx I get that, how are they going to differentiate words in the future then?
@@vintageb8 You don't have that issue in English. It's not an issue in Korean neither. Context is everything.
Thanks for the great video! As Korean who interest in other languages I want to add comment on the video.
One of the main reasons for the decline of Hanja in Korea is the use of spacing. In Japanese, distinguishing words without Kanji is difficult because there is no spacing between words. In contrast, Korean widely uses spacing, making Hanja unnecessary. However, this comes with a drawback: mastering Korean spacing (띄어쓰기) can be quite challenging, and errors in spacing can lead to misunderstandings.
Another perspective is that Hanja in modern Korean is similar to Latin and French in English. Knowing the original Latin or French roots of words can help in understanding and using them in academic writing. Similarly, understanding Hanja can aid in grasping the nuances of Korean vocabulary.
For example, in English, knowing that "benevolent" comes from the Latin "bene" (well) and "volent" (wishing) helps in understanding its meaning as "wishing well." Similarly, in Korean, knowing that the word "경제" (economy) is derived from Hanja characters 經 (경, meaning "to manage") and 濟 (제, meaning "to relieve") provides deeper insight into its meaning.
You can write Japanese with spaces, kana-only texts use spaces, in a manner similar to Korean. Examples are books for small children, and software that cannot display kanji (like old video games or cash registers).
Thank you for sharing this great video! However, I'd like to discuss some points where I have a different perspective.
The last part, which explains why Korea succeeded in dropping Chinese characters while Japan could not, appears to be somewhat off the mark. Nationalism alone may not be sufficient to explain this phenomenon, as both Japanese and Koreans have a strong sense of patriotism. Moreover, Japan has also had several attempts throughout its history to drop Chinese characters, but failed.
We should focus on understanding why Koreans were able to drop Chinese characters right away compared to the Japanese. The key lies in the unique characteristics of Hangeul, which can create nearly 12,000 combinations of syllables with distinct pronunciations. In contrast, the Japanese language employs 41 letters to form words. This distinction is essential because, unlike the Chinese language, which uses intonations to differentiate sounds and meanings, the Japanese lack an alternative method apart from utilizing Chinese characters.
Furthermore, your example of the word "수도" (sudo) in Korean proves my point. Unlike Chinese, where words often carry multiple meanings, "수도" only has two meanings. They have crafted words with different sounds and combinations to avoid homonyms.
The Chinese-profoundly-using phenomenon in the Korean law field isn't also connected to homonyms. It's more closely tied to a social phenomenon where there's a deliberate effort to prevent ordinary people from learning or using legal terminology. Lawyers often employ esoteric words derived from old Chinese or Japanese, making them challenging for most Koreans to comprehend, even when written in the Korean script. This happens in many other countries, too.
Plus, the Korean language has spaces between words that help distinguish words and particles while Japanese doesn't have spaces between words. So, if they don't use spaces or Chinese characters, it is very confusing to discern which characters represent words and which are particles.
I respect your historical perspective, but I believe it's more about the functional, or inherent characteristics of these two languages.
Причина, почему мы бросили Ханджа - без него можно всё понять с помощью правила чтения и словообразования. Таким образом, мы не видим полезность использования Ханджа. Например, слово "잠자리". Есть два произношения и значения этого слова: либо jam ja ri, либо jam jja ri, как омонимы. Оно связано с словообразованием. Если берём другой пример - слова "난자" и "한자". В конце слога обоих слов ㄴ и следует сразу согласный ㅈ. Они должны произноситься одинаково, но второй слог в первом слове произносится как "자" - "ja", а во втором - "jja"
Зачем ставить ханчу в скобки? Это выглядит нелепо. Если без ханчи никак, то пусть она будет прямо в тексте.
@@АлександрАлександров-щ7к8т Если бы Вы уже увидели какие-нибудь тексты, написанные современным корейским языком, Вы сразу заметили бы, что не ставят ханчу в скобки, тем более зумеры не изучают ханчу. В современных русских текстах ставят «ъ» после каждых согласных?
@@АлександрАлександров-щ7к8т Её мы не ставим, поскольку она бесполезная.
Comments summary:
All the non-Koreans see Korea’s sending of Hanja as some personal tragedy.
All the Koreans are busy fixing errors in the video.
왜냐하면 각자 자신들의 조상들의 선택이 옳았다는 이유를 찾아야 하니까
For me, I like Kanji/Chinese characters because it helps me read or comprehend what's written much faster. Because it's like looking at pictures instead of symbols. It takes long time for us to learn tho.
As a Taiwanese, I just want to say there is only three place still using Traditional Chinese which is Taiwan, Hongkong and Macao
and yes, our childhood is quite hard because we have to learn all those complex characters
But for me grown up, I am really happy about that we didn't abandon Traditional Chinese.
If Taiwan wants independence, you need to abandon Chinese
The decline in the use of Hanja in korean is not only due to nationalism. Korean has a spacing system that does not exist in Chinese and Japanese. Even if there are no hanja, the meaning can be distinguished through spacing. For this reason, Korean people would not have felt much inconvenience without hanja, and as a result, the use of hanja would have naturally decreased.
You can write Japanese with spaces, kana-only texts use spaces, in a manner similar to Korean. Examples are books for small children, and software that cannot display kanji (like old video games or cash registers).
나는 한국인이고 일본어를 배울 때 한국식으로 띄어쓰기를 넣어 공부하기도 했습니다.
더불어 한자를 어려워 했으므로 한자를 거의 쓰지않았는데 띄어쓰기 만으로도 많은 혼란이 사라진다는 것을 느꼈습니다.
한자는 모르는 단어를 보아도 그 뜻을 추측할 수 있다는 장점이 있지만 한국인들은 이미 한자를 몰라도 모르는 단어의 의미를 쉽게 추측할 수 있습니다. 예를들면 '고' 라는 한자는 '높다'라는 의미를 가지는데, 한국인들은 이 한자를 몰라도 '고'가 붙은 단어는 '높다'의 의미를 가지고 있다는 것을 많은 단어의 공통점으로부터 배우지 않아도 알고있습니다
興味深い
One error to point out is that Koreans don't consider Hanja as a remnant of Japanese occupation. In fact, in the 90s, advocates of Hanja argued that Hanja should not be abandoned since it's become a part of Korean culture due to its use for almost 2000 years.
lol im studying japanese and im already at the stage where i wish to be done with furigana bcz reading with kanji is so much easier for comprehension
As a Japanese,a Korean learning beginner, Hanja-mixed sentences seen in super old documents are way easier to understand to me, since there's less need to reconstruct meanings from Hangeul which shows the sounds.btw.
요즘은 유튜브가 번역도 해주네요. 짧은 문장들로 쓸게요. 한국은 한자 학습을 줄이고 있어요. 개인적으로는 안타깝습니다. 독해력을 키우려면 어느 정도 한문을 알아야 한다는 입장이에요. 동음이의어가 한자로 구분되니까요. 한국 중국 일본은 한자 문화권이에요. 삼국의 오랜 관계로 한자로 된 단어도 많아요. 한국에서 이런 말을 하면 질타를 받기도 합니다. 😢
+ thumnail만 보고 댓글을 썼습니다. 영상을 온전히 못 보았어요. 알고리즘을 따라 들어왔어요. 동아시아에 관심을 보여줘서 기뻤습니다.
그야 당신이 중국인이니 그런 중국중심적인 사상을 가지고 있는것이고 한자는 전세계에서 배척 되어야한다.
@@youtube-offcial 아 네네. 만물중국인설 잘 들었습니다
조선족이지 뭐
Fascinating thanks
한자는 그자체로 읽을순 없기에, 문맹률을 높이는 치명적 요소다. 그래서 한자를 안쓰려고 만든 문자들이 한글과 일본문자인데, 한글만 한자폐지에 완벽히 성공했다. (물론 한국어를 공부하는 외국인들한테는 정말 미안하지만 한국인은 이게 최선이다.😢)
It's simple to explain why . Japanese without using Kanji may be all chaos, especially in written form, while the Korean is not
I don’t agree with the last part of the video, where you said in Korea Chinese usage may come back.
More and more Sino-Korean words (words borrowed from Chinese) are replaced by words borrowed from English.
For example, 색 (color) is from Chinese character 色, but nowadays many people in Korea use 컬러 which sounds ‘color’ in Hangul, instead of 색. There are bunch of similar examples. Speaking Korean without English words is becoming extremely hard.
That is also the case in more sophisticated areas. If you read modern academic journals in Korea, people writes English words in parentheses when there can be a confusion. This would have been Hanja back then.
Language is like a living creature, I believe and it evolves every time. One way is by borrowing words from foreign countries mostly from culturally and politically powerful ones. Just like English had French influences.
For Korean, this had been China for a long time, but now it is the USA.
Words from Chinese have been around with us for long time, so they have been integrated to Korean more, but that does not mean those Chinese words are essential to Korean.
Using more English words in Korean is more likely future IMO than going back to Hanja usage.
After all, words from Chinese and English are both foreign words to Koreans. We can just substitute one out.
But if foreign words are used for a long time it would become loanwords.
@@刘卫皇-v2j Yes that’s what I meant. We have been using a lot of loanwords from Chinese, but loanwords from English are becoming dominant and many of them replacing Chinese ones already.
@@user-irkdj248dkdollii I know this.Its normal cuz many new stuffs are created by European and American.But interestly ,the north one refused to adopt English words but Chinese.You know why
@@刘卫皇-v2j Yes but I am not only talking about new words. Chinese loanwords that have been used for a long time are being replaced by English words. And the speed is very fast.
For North Koreans, you are a bit wrong. They try to use Korean words for new things. They try their best to avoid using any foreign language including Hanja. You know we have original Korean words that are not from any other countries, and NK promotes using those very much.
@@user-irkdj248dkdollii I see.But It seems like its hard to make new words only with Inherent words,especially these words to describe complex things .Like robot in north Korea is like kikae(机械)salam mixed with Chinese word and Inherent word.
Point is certain, that is, from the pre -Qin dynasty, there have been 4 times large -scale immigrants from Chinese Han people to enter the Japanese islands and Korean Peninsula, which have a profound impact on the historical trends of China and Japan and ( Korean Peninsula ).
Focus on reference materials :
Yayoi period (300 B.C. - A.D. 300) 彌生時代
Kofun period (300 - 645) 大和時代
Asuka Period (538-710 AD) (645 -710) 飛鳥時代
Nara period (710-794) 奈良時代
Heian period (794-1185) 平安時代
Chinese Han people's four large -scale immigrants enter the Japanese islands record :
1. Qin and Han Dynasty
Qin Shihuang (秦始皇 259-210 BC) swept the six regions. In order to escape the war, the Chinese people fled to Japan in two ways: Some Chinese people crossed the sea from the Northeast to the Korean Peninsula to Japan. Japan.
2. During the Wei, Jin, Northern and Southern Dynasties (420 -589 BC)
During the period of "Upheaval of the Five Barbarians 五胡亂華", in order to avoid the war, the Chinese people began a wave of migration to a large -scale migration around.
Most of the fleeing Chinese finally went to Japan, forming the climax of immigration to Japan. The representative is Liu Azhi (劉阿知), the descendant of Emperor Han Xian(漢獻帝).
3. The Sui and Tang Dynasties (581-907 BC)
Chinese Emperor send a large -scale Tang ambassador (they were Chinese )to Japan 倭, while China sent a large number of people and technology and culture to Japan (for Chinese lived in Japan) . Most of these people are monks or cultural scholars. They are left as required by the Chinese who lived in Japan because of the difficult sailing and welcomed by Japan. They often stay and lived in Japan . The representative is the monk Jianzhen(監真).
4. The Song (960-1279)and Ming dynasties(1368-1644)
In the Yuan Dynasty, the Han people in the southern Song Dynasty broke their families. In order to avoid the war and kill, they moved to Japan one after another. The representative of this period was scholar of the Southern Song Dynasty - Lanxi Daolong(蘭溪道隆).
* The sea between China and Japan is very dangerous. Therefore, the ship of ancient Chinese needs to pass through the peninsula (today in South Korea). It is safer to reach Japan.
In addition, the ancient Japanese and Koreans could not enter China (nor could they communicate with the Chinese). Entering the Chinese city must require the Chinese Han identity certificate or pass certificate. Only Chinese talents in Japan can enter China.
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In ancient China. Due to the escape or expansion of territorial reasons. There were many records of the Han people moved to the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese islands (including Okinawa). Establishing small countries and regimes on these islands (representing Chinese senior officials rather than emperor).
In addition to the later period of Japan (because of the ocean). The Han regime on the Korean Peninsula has always been the ancient Chinese territory and the scope of direct jurisdiction (but sometimes it is similar to the different phenomenon of political opinions from the central government. It is similar to the situation in Taiwan and Hong Kong today. When the relationship between Taiwan and Hong Kong and the central government is bad. Sometimes they think they are independent countries or claim to be non -Chinese).
The history of the establishment of a regime on the Korean Peninsula (Goguryeo, Baiji, Silla, Goryeo , Joseon). It is not the history of the Korean people. Instead, it is the history of the local regime of the Han people in northern China.These royal family and nobles are Chinese and descendants who move to the peninsula. They are wearing Han nationality clothing and using Chinese characters. They also claim to be the Han family. They are like Hong Kong and Macau and Taiwan. The Han people basically speak two Chinese languages (Chinese dialects+Chinese official language), one of the Han dialects that are lost.
* There are more than 20 dialects in Chinese Han nationality.
Only some civilians and slaves are indigenous people from the south of the peninsula (Koreans). This is very certain.
(A large number of ancient Chinese tombs were unearthed on the 4/5 Korean Peninsula today. Han murals (depicting the lives of the Han people in the north), the fairy and god beast of the Han nationality.Han religion. Chinese character stone monument. Han Dynasty coins. ...........
The southernmost part of the peninsula is unearthed in the original and backward Korean national life tools.
It can be seen that the extremes of two different ethnic groups( Chinese VS Korean ) and different civilizations exist at the same time in the same period of the peninsula history.
I am an English speaker with additional fading knowledge on a couple European languages. On my trip to Taiwan and Japan I was sort of prepared with a pocket guide to Kanji and supplanted with listings of Katakana and Hiragana characters. I still recall one Kanji sign that kept repeating in the small guide -- they called it "Rice Paddy". A basis of dozens of words. Well, during my nearly 3 week stay in Osaka, I took a one day trip to Hiroshima. I was easily able to decode the destination "Hiroshima" on the train ticket, as it was printed in Katakana. However, on the return to Osaka, I was stumbled on something else, until I realized that ticket was printed in Hiragana. For my trip(s) to Korea, I did not find any use for my Kanji pocket guide. Now I see, why. Thank you!
As a mongolian, I am kinda glad we never adopted Chinese characters. Although our grammar is similar to korean and japanese, our phonetics with consonant clusters would make a silibary/logographic writing so hard, alphabetic writing is much more suitable. Cyrrilic works pretty well I think
Does "kabuk" mean "turtle" in Korean? Well, in Turkish "kabuk" is the word for "shell" (as in a turtle's shell, sea shell, snail shell) or various outer parts (peels of bananas, skins of oranges, scabs of wounds). This seems really interesting. There were even linguistic theories connecting Korean with Turkish (along with Turkic, Uralic, Mongolic languages and Japanese), so this is kinda intriguing for me.
@ハリット kabuğu da var aslında ama. Bu Ural-Altay olayını galiba bir bizde ciddiye alıyorlar galiba.
Not a fan of altaic, but it is true Turkish and Korean share few similar words. Search some on Google and you'll find some examples
That’s right, the pronunciation is similar. Turkish ancestors were neighbors with Korea. There is also a history of military alliance.
can't go on a single Korean video without a turanist in the comments
너희 조상들은 아주 옛날에 한반도 북쪽에서 우리 조상들하고 친하게 지냈기때문에 그런거같아요