Thread: Learning Korean
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komitsuki (Offline)
Busier Than Shinjuku Station
 
Posts: 997
Join Date: Feb 2009
08-18-2009, 12:19 AM

Quote:
Originally Posted by Miyavifan View Post
I don't understand this. I'm sorry.
There are two kinds of words in Korean:

1. native Korean words and foreign loanwords (approx. 30% of words)
2. Chinese-character-based words either from Korea, China and Japan (approx. 70%)

Because there are a lot of homophones (words that sound the same but has different meanings) in those Chinese-character-based words, you need Chinese characters to understand the precise meanings. If not, people learning Korean will have a hard time.

And besides, 98% of Koreans have names based on Chinese characters.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Miyavifan View Post
@ komitsuki

there's no e in Hangul.
I'm only using the official romanization method endorsed by the South Korea's Ministry of Culture since the year 2000. This is what I'm used to because of the old McCune–Reischauer romanization system is extremely hard for native speakers and non-native speakers to understand.

I don't want people to say [han-GOOL] because it's a deliberately wrong pronunciation.


JapanForum's semi-resident amateur linguist.
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