Promoting Chinese characters in Korea
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Most of what is said below applies mainly to South Korea, since Hangul-only writing has been even more deeply entrenched in North Korea than in the south.
"Debate grows over teaching Chinese characters" (9/14/15)
Education specialists are divided over whether to make Chinese characters part of the Korean language and literature textbook for elementary schoolchildren, with heated discussion continuing.
While opponents argue it will hurt students' ability to understand the Korean language, supporters says it will enhance their ability.
The Ministry of Education has announced it will include Chinese characters in elementary school books from next year.
According to the government plan, up to 600 characters will appear in the textbooks. They will accompany Koreans vocabulary that needs clarification.
"It is because many Korean words are identical in writing and pronunciation but have different meanings according to how it is written in Chinese," a ministry official said. "It is estimated that at least 50 percent of the Korean vocabulary has Chinese influence."
Middle and high school students learn Chinese characters, but elementary schools have not taught the characters for almost four decades.
The official said the Chinese vocabulary would not be taught separately, nor tested.
Korean language educators and school teachers are against the new policy.
"The new measure goes against the trend that gives priority to learning Korean language without using Chinese words," 400 university professors said in a statement.
"Thanks to that, the illiteracy rate has gone down, and Korean students' reading comprehension ranks top in the world. Students will have difficulty understanding the content if the textbooks have Chinese characters, and this will damage their academic ability."…
Could this possibly be the beginning of hanja ("Chinese characters") creeping back into Korean writing?
From a senior Korean language teacher:
Not likely, I think. Teaching Chinese to Korean students is like teaching Latin to American students to help their understanding of English etymology. It's been about three decades since newspapers stopped using Hanja, and only a few publications, such as legal documents, still use Hanja. As China has become an important trade partner, more Koreans want to learn Chinese and think that knowing Hanja could be beneficial in many ways. But most Koreans, including myself, do not feel it is necessary to have Hanja in writings because they can tell the meaning of homonyms from the context.
An expert on Korean writing systems says of South Korea that "It's been seesawing back and forth for decades" on the matter of more or fewer Hanja in education. Another specialist on Korean language and script says something similar:
This debate has been going on for many, many decades, Victor. It ebbs and flows, and I don’t expect it to stop. But you know what the general arc has been since Korean independence. I don’t expect that to change, either.
This article presents claims from both Hanja and Hangul activists and is worth reading:
"Some pushing for more elementary school instruction of Chinese characters" (8/13/15)
Advocates of increased education in Chinese characters, called Hanja in Korean, argue that the use of Korea’s Hangul script has resulted in low rates of basic illiteracy, but that many students are “functionally illiterate” due to a failure to fully understand what they are reading.
…
“The inclusion of Hanja in elementary textbooks stands to impede the basic language learning and cognitive development of young people, and cannot be accepted,” the teachers said.
The mention of "cognitive development" here is well worth considering in greater depth.
I think the situation in Korea with regard to the Hanja is somewhat comparable to the situation in China with regard to the traditional forms of the Hanzi. In both cases, conservative-minded individuals may promote their return, but it won't happen. Hangul in Korea and simplified characters in the People's Republic of China (PRC) have long been accepted as the standard form of writing.
As for Hangul, it got started in the middle of the 15th century, and has been enthusiastically promoted as the sole official script for well over half a century in modern Korea. Not only do the bulk of Koreans proudly accept it as their own writing system, they have been actively promoting it outside of Korea as well.
"The Hangeul Alphabet Moves beyond the Korean Peninsula" (8/6/09)
"Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part II" (12/24/09)
"Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part III" (10/7/10)
"Cha-cha Cia-cia: the last dance" (10/8/12)
South Koreans may still rarely employ Hanja in highly specialized circumstances:
"Using Sinitic characters in Korea" (7/3/15)
For all intents and purposes, however, Hangul is the sole, exclusive script for both North Korea and South Korea.
Similarly, simplified characters have been the sole official Sinographic form of writing in the PRC. With very few exceptions, the people of China accept the simplified forms as the real characters and the traditional / complicated forms as relics of the feudal past. Here I will give an example to show how this attitude plays out in reality. When Stanford University recently opened a new East Asia Library, the Chinese name of the library was posted at the entrance in traditional characters. This led to complaints from a contingent of PRC students who declared that the traditional characters "do not represent our culture". But this is America, so the University declined to remove the traditional characters and substitute the simplified forms. In mainland China, the simplified characters are the officially sanctioned writing system, just as in Korea (both North Korea and South Korea) Hangul is the officially sanctioned writing system.
There are plentiful grounds for linguistic excitement on the Korean peninsula. Another hot topic is framed by this question:
"Is Korean diverging into two languages?" (11/6/14)
Linguistic change will continue to take place in the Koreas, as it does all over the world, but don't expect anything dramatic within the next few decades. Whatever happens will be so gradual that you'll barely notice it.
[h.t. Carolyn Lye; thanks to Bob Ramsey, Haewon Cho, and Bill Hannas]
Bathrobe said,
September 20, 2015 @ 8:40 am
It reminds me what happened when I was in the Bank of China doing some business. I was having trouble getting the correct form of a simplified character so I wrote the complex form. The girl at the counter said that complex characters weren't acceptable. I noticed people at neighbouring counters (inside and outside) suppressing a smile when I pointed out that the logo of the Bank of China is in traditional characters (中國銀行).
Perhaps PRC students should do a bit more demonstrating at home and a bit less overseas — although perhaps they are well aware that any such protest in China would be ignored completely.
Lew Perin said,
September 20, 2015 @ 9:40 am
Do the Hanja supporters really think Chinese characters are unambiguous?
leoboiko said,
September 20, 2015 @ 12:16 pm
I find "like Latin for English speakers" to be a good comparison.
shubert said,
September 20, 2015 @ 3:26 pm
President Park set a brilliant example in reading Chinese classics.
Kuiwon said,
September 20, 2015 @ 4:32 pm
@Lew, compared to "pure" Korean, relatively yes. It's being widely reported in Korean media that South Korea has the lowest rate of functional literacy among developed countries. I've noticed the younger generation is more proficient in Hanja than my own.
It should be noted that Hanja education at the elementary school level was first abolished by Park Chunghee. For obvious reasons, both liberals and conservatives don't like to mention this fact when discussing this issue.
Matt said,
September 20, 2015 @ 8:18 pm
Given that trade ties with China are (apparently) part of the reason people want to reintroduce hanja to elementary schools, I wonder if anyone is proposing that simplified characters be taught.
Jeff W said,
September 20, 2015 @ 8:39 pm
Any conversation about the status of Hangul in South Korea and I am reminded of the Republic of Korea pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo, the exterior of which was composed of 40,000 “pixel-panels”—basically the outside of the building was nothing but Hangul. It seemed to be a celebration of the writing system.
I’m not quite getting the argument. Isn’t the debate about teaching Hanja (which, as I understand it, are Chinese characters incorporated into Korean)? It’s not about “teaching Chinese,” is it? And, if that’s the case, why wouldn’t learning transliterated Chinese meet the goal?
To the extent American students learn Greek roots, e.g., morph- (shape), pent- (five), therm- (heat, warm), for etymological purposes, how many of them learn Greek orthography to go along with it? Is anyone arguing that they need to or that they need to “learn Greek”?
Michael Watts said,
September 21, 2015 @ 4:30 am
Since this is only done by enthusiasts, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the percentage of such students who also learn Greek orthography is fairly high. Obviously, learning the Greek alphabet is unnecessary for studying English words that contain Greek roots, but there are a number of people who do argue that students need to learn (classical) Greek, since it's a traditional cultural practice. I tend to suspect that that's basically the same reason there's a push for Hanja in Korea.
flow said,
September 21, 2015 @ 6:22 am
Reading this:
"The new measure goes against the trend that gives priority to learning Korean language without using Chinese words," 400 university professors said in a statement.—
What is rendered here as 'Chinese words' must have originated 한자 (漢字) 'Chinese characters, Chinese writing'; otherwise—if the 400 professors really meant to say "Korean language without Chinese vocabulary"—it would be truly a new turn in language policy, similar to what took place in North Korea to some extent.
Eidolon said,
September 21, 2015 @ 11:30 am
@flow there were/are also proposals to lessen the use of Chinese/Japanese loan words in South Korea. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_the_Korean_language. Even the National Institute of the Korean Language looks to be involved.
Jeff W said,
September 21, 2015 @ 6:00 pm
@ Michael Watts
Huh? Really? I learned roots like that in English and science classes (at a regular public high school)—something like this handout or this background material, which don’t appear to be aimed at enthusiasts. Are teachers using resources like these themselves familiar with Greek orthography? It’s nowhere to be seen in the materials themselves. (We didn’t spend a lot of time on these roots—they were mostly mentioned in passing—but we were aware of them.)
But I guess my point is that even I can tell that a Korean word (or, in this case, name) like Samsung is related in some way to the Cantonese saam1 [“three”] and sing1 [“star”]. It’s not all that necessary to know the Chinese characters for those words any more than it is to know the Greek orthography for morph-, tetra-, penta- or other roots if we’re talking just about being familiar with the etymology.
KWillets said,
September 21, 2015 @ 7:39 pm
There's another article in the Korea Herald:
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150921001084
It looks like most groups oppose it. There's also apparently a backlash against what the president calls "excessive English education".
KWillets said,
September 23, 2015 @ 8:28 pm
Now it's been delayed until next year:
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150923001087
There's a lot of resistance to giving kids extra curriculum.