Korean and Mixed Hanjas
Here's a short page for me to give a commentary on the use of Hanjas, or
Chinese Characters, in the Korean language. One question that Westerners often ask when learning Korean is whether hanjas are necessary or not. Many Koreans will answer no on that one since hanjas are rarely used in Korean texts nowadays.
My answer is that Westerners learning Korean should take some time to learn hanjas but be careful not to spend too much time on it. First off, a quick overview on what hanjas are. Basically, hanjas are chinese characters that represent the chinese roots for Sino-Korean words. People often confuse the characters with the chinese language itself. It's not the same as the chinese language. They're merely symbolic represents of words containing chinese roots and are used widely in the Japanese language and have been used in other Asian languages such as Korean and Vietnamese in the past.
In North Korea, hanjas have not been used in literature since 1949. In South Korea, hanjas have been widely used up to the 1990s. However, they are used in dictionaries for reference. For learning the Korean language, knowing a few hundred hanjas will help westerners guess and remember some words. As an example, one hanja is 漁, pronounced 어 and means fish. Knowing that hanja can help a person remember some of the words that contain that root such as 어부(fisherman), 어선(fishing boat), 문어(octopus). I do have to caution that knowing hanjas is not a silver bullet for learning Korean words. Mixed script Korean texts such as a Korean Bible and old Korean newspapers can contain over 3000 hanjas. Anybody learning Korean as a second language will have to use other methods for remembering words such as mnemonics and plain repetition.
Proposals for the use of Hanjas
1. Hanjas should be used for serious literature and subjects such as religious scripture, medicine, law, history, science, and philosophy.
The Korean language, with many Sino-Korean words, is full of homonyms and short words that are difficult to remember. The use of hanjas in serious literature would bring clarity where precise understanding of words is required. In this regard, hanjas are under-used in Korean literature. Other types of Korean literature such as newspapers, magazines, sports results, weather reports, restaurant menus, and personal letters shouldn't require hanjas.
2. Mixed Script Korean writing should be written vertically with the columns arranged right to left.
Unfortunately, the Unicode standard does not adequately support vertical text, making it necessary for Korean to be written left to right on horizontal lines. Historically, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Mongolian have been written vertically. In the future, the Unicode standard will hopefully provide better support for vertical text, including the old Mongolian script, as well as cursive fonts for the roman alphabet and cyrillic script.
