Sat

11

Oct

2008

Linguistically, everything falls into place

What works like an alphabet, looks like ideograms, has a perfect structure and can be learned in 24 hours? The answer is: Hangul, a unique writing system developed around the year 1443 by King Sejong the Great, during one of the highest periods of  Korean history. Widely regarded as a very advanced linguistic inventions, the Korean alphabet is perhaps one of the best tools to deepen our knowledge of the uniques features of Korean people. The picture on the left portrays a few paper rolls (exposed and sold in the traditional area of Insa-dong, in Seoul), with the Korean alphabet and the relative Chinese characters shown side to side.

....Korean alphabet and the relative Chinese characters shown side to side.

This kind of document was quite common in ancient times, when the Korean society was evolving, and developing its own culture, trying to move away from the heavy influence of the Chinese empire, or protecting itself from the risk of a cultural assimilation with Japan.

So, what is so special about Korean language, and why would we want to learn it? First of all, learning how to read and write Korean is definitely easy. Easier than most of other contemporary writing systems. Anyone, in just one day of practice, can learn how to write and read all the different sounds, derived from the combination of vowels and consonants. Sure enough, learning to speak and understand it’s an entirely different story, but the first step into the Korean language is quite easy and fascinating.

Probably the easiest among all the languages of the Far East.

If you wish to step into the world of Asian languages and culture, you can now enter from one of the main doors: Korean language will allow you full access to one of the best preserved Asian cultures, one of its most active economies, one of the liveliest cities in Asia, tons of culture and fantastic food. All this, without the usual troubles associated to most asian languages (either with phonetics or structure).
To give you an example, learning Japanese would require, as a first step, the understanding and memorization of three different writing systems: two different syllabic sets (Hiragana, used for Japanese words  and Katakana, used for foreign-borrowed terms) plus a  minimum set of nearly 2000 Kanji (Chinese-derived characters, sometimes modified or even re-invented by Japanese, to write names, verb stems, word roots and other language parts); while this system is graphically fascinating, it poses a serious challenge to any new learner.
On the other hand, Korean is really easy to approach. Once learned how to write and read, the assimilation of new vocabulary goes fast. True enough, even Korean has its own sets of Chinese characters (namely Hanja), more or less in the same number of those used in Japanese, but their presence in everyday language is limited (newspaper and official names), and Koreans, in general, use them to a much lesser extent than most Japanese do.
Another good reason to embrace Korean language, and a very good one, is that it will open you every single door in this Country: from food to shopping, from dating to work, I can’t describe the difference that Korean language will make while there. Korean people are immensely proud of their culture and when any foreigner shows the will to make an effort and learn even a few simple sentences, the results are spectacular. They just feel honored and will reply with a great deal of help.

 


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