History of Writing in Japan and Korea
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- Опубліковано 14 січ 2023
- Answering why Korean dropped Hanja while Japan didn't, as well as a look at the history of writing in both languages.
Sources & Further reading;
/ korean-and-japanese-pa...
www.google.com/books/edition/...
www.joshmcneill.com/docs/Pape...
www.google.com/books/edition/...
www.jica.go.jp/jica-ri/IFIC_a...
www.jstor.org/stable/3096136
koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/...
**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.
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
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)
The simplicity of Korean script must be a factor too. The letters are phonemes so there are no 'guess the pronunciation' challenges like in English. Even beginners can pick up reading Korean pretty fast
tbf, the same applies to japanese hiragana and katakana. If they had a kana script with spaces, it would work just fine as a written language. Admittedly though, there exists no system for how to add spaces to roumanji and by extension kana script, though it wouldn't be too hard to create one if they had wanted to do it.
@@danimyte3021kana takes up too much space though. It would be like writing each letter of hangul separately, instead of clusters of three.
@@johndoe-ss6mm no. I'm German. And English writing is just a horrible mess. Mostly because of the French. And mostly because they never updated their outdated and incoherent writing system. Height, hate, weight, tight, wait, white, eight, eat, ear, great.
If you don't know the pronunciation you can't read the words above. Like chinese😂
The letters are phonemes from like several centuries ago. Nowadays there's actually quite a bit of discrepancy between what is written and what is spoken because the script is preserving etymology rather than phonetic realization.
@@danimyte3021 Korean hageul is definately much easier though. There are about 96 characters to memorize in Hiragana and Katakana while Hanguel can express about 20 times wider sounds with just 24 letters. And still if you momorize 6 of them, you can literally catch others in a minute. For instance, ㄱ is a G in Korean and ㅋis a k. You see how they sound similar, and so does look similar with just one strokes added on. This works for every single consonants in Hangeul. ㄷ-d ㅌ-t ㄴ-n (korean n sounds more like a d and is also placed in the same position as we pronounce the alphabet d)// ㅂ-ㅍ // ㅅ / ㅈ // ㅇ / ㅎ //. ㅏ =a ㅑ -ya // ㅗ - o ㅛ-yo / ㅜ -u ㅠ-yu, etc.
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.
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）
Great video! I really love the research and the way you presented all the information so clearly.
Amazing video! The visuals really supported the material instead of competing with or simply repeating it. So informative AND enjoyable!
Nice video, even with the few videos you've uploaded I'm delighted with the information in them, keep going ;)
I have studied both Korean and Japanese and wondered these exact questions! Thank you for explaining.
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.
@@Theo-oh3jkthat may be true, but the other southern Chinese languages were definitely more conservative compared to Mandarin (Mandarin changed more)
This is very informative and helpful!
Thank you for your nice video 😊
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.
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
thank you for this lovely video
Thank you for using more than one fonts for Korean. I deeply appreciate that :)
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.
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
Amazing video! It deserves WAY more views and likes. Very underrated
Top tier content! Subscribed!
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.
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.
This was incredibly interesting!
This video was fascinating!
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…
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!
really great video!
Super interesting, I had no idea these were standardized only so recently!
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!
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!
another great video!
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.
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.
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
Fascinating thanks
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!
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
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".
Nice video!
Nice video on the topics, I also did some research a while back, truly fascinating especially for Taiwanese which learns Chinese with traditional characters.
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”
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.
I think about this weekly
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.
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
its not different than just reading a korean word, i promise. we dont need hanja
...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.
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.
Hey dude! I'm studying linguistics pretty heavily and have been doing a lot of research on speech impediments recently. I have known many people with the vowel+r impediment that you have, but I've been unable to find a name for it, or any information about it. Do you know what it's called?
Mines a form of dyslexia + dyspraxia, an extreme form at that.
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.
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
masterpiece
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.
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.
That’s super interesting! How did the Korean mixed script work? For instance, the Korean word for water, 물, is a native term. Would it still be spelled 水? Or is 水 only used for the Chinese-Korean pronunciation (수)? Is there something akin to on’yomi kun’yomi? Or does 水 only have one pronunciation? Would 물 then just be spelled in Hangul even in the mixed script?
Native Korean speaker here!! To answer your question, 물 is the pure Korean way of saying "water". We wouldn't say "I want to drink 수" because you don't say "I want to drink hydro" in English, for example. Hanja is Korean's root, just like it'd be for Latin/Greek words in English. So 물 will be written as it is in mixed script because it's a pure Korean word. I hope this helped!!
@@B4B0me Thank you so much for your explanation!! That’s super interesting. So Korean mixed script differed from the Japanese one, as the latter would also assign native readings to the kanjis. Hanja in Korean is only for Sino-Korean pronunciations. Got it!! Thanks again :)
@@ianxyoutube Which actually makes Korean mixed script quite interesting… As kanji in Japanese has the potential to represent all words (although in practice I know kanas are used for nouns too), in Korean, hanja can only be used for Sino-Korean words… which is an interesting limitation. Imagine if English borrowed words from Russian, and spelled Russian words only in Cyrillic. That’d be specific!
@@ChristianJiang It's basically like Latin in English. See how latin words combined makes a whole new word? For instance homo- same / nym- sound, and they add up to make homonyms which implies words pronounced the same. It works exactly the same in Korean, like you wouldn't ever say He is homo instead of he is the same! right?
In the mixed script of early 20th century, every content word was written in Hanja, while function words were written in Korean. So it would be 吾等은水를嫌惡한다說해도無妨할事다. Note that 吾等, 水, 說, 事are originally 우리, 물, 말, 것 but written in Hanja which has the closest match in terms of meaning. This is called an extreme version of 국한문혼용(國漢文混用) and not the case for mixed script in the mid/late 20th century. The latter would look like this: 우리는 물을 嫌惡한다 말해도 無妨할 것이다. Since 嫌惡 and 無妨 are sino-Korean words, they are written in Hanja while Korean words are written in Hangeul.
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 read that North Korea went to all-hangeul quickly because of nationalism while South Korea didn't shift until much later.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chinese (hanji )is symbols ,the speed of reading is light speed(WYSWYG) , you need not to think and reconstructe the meaning,it can be use in any language to make a combination for accuracy and fast transmission .just same as the Japanese.example：l need fifty thousand dollar=l need 五万元。necesito cincuenta mil yuanes=necesito 五万元。perfect?
Very ambitious video, I didn't quite understand everything and the video was a but complicated, nevertheless I praise you for your effort.
2:40 "道" means "road; way", and "到" means "arrive; reach; get to; go to". The pronunciation of these two Chinese characters in Mandarin Chinese is "dào" in pinyin.
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?
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。
It was an interesting experiencing walking through old palaces and being able to read the signs a move the gates and doors as a foreigner, while knowing the locals can’t haha.
a mistake around 2:57, 到 is not raod/way it should be 道
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.
@@user-qb5cz7ou9f 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
@@user-qb5cz7ou9f 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.
Chinese characters seem like good characters in that they induce to continue studying.
Even native speakers forget it if they don’t use it often.
I've seen an article saying that these days, with digitalization, the number of things to write by hand has drastically decreased, so more and more Chinese people are unable to write Chinese characters by hand.
...not unable,just sometime forgot it but pick it up very quickly
We Chinese spend 12 hours a day in school, 5 or 6 days a week, and during that time, we are writing constantly. Therefore, it's impossible to forget. Being immersed in the digital world away from school certainly confuses us about the exact stroke order, but it doesn't mean we forget completely.
I’ve seen articles saying European/American students are losing the ability to write by hand due to keyboards. It’s all a load of click baity bollocks. So I’d take those articles about Chinese children with a huge pinch of salt.
10:24 as a chinese person trying to learn japanese i thank these people immensely for their contribution to my personal convienence
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
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.
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.
漢文(kanbun) isn't a method of reading Chinese, it refers to literary Chinese text itself. 訓読(kundoku) is the method of reading it as though it were Japanese. 返り点(kaeriten) are the symbols Japanese uses to annotate what order the words should appear in the 訓読. The English Wikipedia does not consistently use these terms correctly.
good video
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
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.
@@user-iv8ex1ek4j
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.
I find it interesting that South Korean movie posters used Hanja way into the 1980s
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
1:08 shouldn't 은 be 는?
Yep
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
Correction at 2:40: wrong character is used. It's 道, not 到.
Classical Chinese does have inversion, so changing the word order may not actually change what is acted on what
I think it could be quite sensitive topic as language is linked to the identity of the culture. And as a Korean I'd like to make few important things clear as some people are confusing the others with their guess.
Korean and Japanese belong to the same language group as you can already see them sharing very similar sentence structure and overall grammatical elements. On the other hand, Chinese lanuage belongs to Tibetian family and the way a sentence generated is something totally different. Koreans had language but we didn't have media to leave record. That's how we start to use Chinese characters. There were two different ways: we started to use a few of Chinese vocab (as academic way we were influenced like from the wise men). Otherwise, we didn't care about the Chinese letters meanings, but we only make use of them for phonetic purpose. In this way, meaning of the letters were ignored and letters literally delivered the sound.
Since Korean language was invented (as you can imagine Chinese character didn't efficiently fit Korean language), people don't know how vocab in Korean from China's vocab originally look and what meanings each of their characters has anymore. (it's like historical trace now) Of course, you can speak advanced Korean easiler with understandings of CHINESE CHARACTERS (not language) than without.
From time to time we see opinions that kanji should be abolished from the Japanese language. Kanji has been used in Japan for a long time, so why should we abolish it now? It is a fact that there used to be a theory of kanji abolition in Japan. It is also true that after the war, partly due to the policy of GHQ, kanji was partially simplified and kana usage was changed from historical to modern kana usage. However, many Japanese people rejected the abolition of kanji. This is because kanji is part of our culture and naturally exists in our country's time line.
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.
There's a mistake at 2:55. The character you put up there for "road, way" means "to go to" or "to arrive."
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
japan has had 3 writing systems, Han Zi, Hiragana, and Katakana.
After the Meiji restoration, they started to use Katakana for mostly Western words. To me it feels like a radical decision to give up a big part of their writing system to represent mere loan words, but ultimately it turned out to be a very convenient solution. It makes it extremely easy to integrate any new foreign concepts to their vocabulary, and readers can instantaneously recognize foreign proper nouns and names with zero uncertainty.
Katakana does make the recognition of names easier, but I don’t really see the point of marking loan words. Many everyday words are loan words. Rajio, terebi, pantsu, waishatsu, sukato, pasukon, basu, biiru, and many more used just as often as words of Japanese and Chinese origin. I can’t see what is gained by writing them in katakana. Katakana for onomatopoeia does make manga more lively, though!
I’d argue it’s one writing system with 3 scripts
I mean, katakana was also reserved for writing pronunciations of chinese loanword pronunciations, so it makes sense that way
It's not convenient, it's useless. Katakana has the same syllables as Hiragana, so if Japan used lone words, they might as well use the Latin characters
@@robinharwood5044 I thought the same until i spent hours trying to look up too many a Korean word and not finding it in any of the vocabularies, only to belatedly realise this is a Hangul-ized English loanword (for example 싸인 - sign, 핔 - pick, 헛 - hot and many others).
Loanwords being ubiquitous is THE reason for marking them, because they will be breaking all kinds of pronunciation and grammar rules if read natively and only bring confusion.
In fact, Korean official rules already tend to use lesser used letters (ㅋㅌㅍ) to transcribe English loans thus already de-facto marking them.
2:41 The character on the right should've been 道. 道 means "way" as in 道理 or "road" as in 道路 or "say" as in 道歉。到 means to arrive as in 到達 or until as in 到時候. Their pronunciations are the same.
Korean still use hanja in historical books and law books, this would be a disaster for average students to study.
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