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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3

Hanja edits

The only thing i see that has any relevancy to hanja is the first sentence. "Due to standardization efforts..." although its unreferenced.

The rest have almost nothing to do with hanja and is more of a subway guide. It may look like vandalism but it belongs to a subway guide of korea page or something and contributes nothing to the viewer's knowledge of hanja. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Subvertmsm (talk • contribs) 02:31, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm rather concerned at Subvertmsm's edits to this article:
1. They have not been written from the point of view of someone who knows anything about linguistics. The opening paragraph is particularly bad from this point of view. This sentence shows the muddled thinking typical of a layman:
  • More specifically, it refers to those Korean spoken language written using Chinese characters with Korean phonetics.
What are "Chinese characters with Korean phonetics"? What is "Korean spoken language written using Chinese characters"? This doesn't make a great deal of sense.
2. In the process of editing, potentially valuable and useful information has simply been deleted:
  • The fact that Hanja are essentially the same as Traditional Chinese characters (i.e., have not been simplified as in China or Japan) has been omitted. The claim is made that there are no possible sources for this. Before deleting, couldn't Subvertmsm have found a few sources? I'm pretty sure that Hanja are largely identical to Traditional Chinese characters and that something could be found to support this.
  • I take the following back: The 'hani' example is interesting in the light of how Chinese characters have been adapted to writing languages like Japanese and Vietnamese. Since I don't know Korean, I'm not in a position to comment on the factualness of the example 'hani'. But deleting any reference to this phenomenon because the example is wrong seems to be rather high-handed. Useful information on this aspect still remains.
  • Information on the way in which Hanja are combined in place names has been removed. This could have been placed in the article on Sino-Korean vocabulary instead of being deleted.
Do we have any editors with some knowledge of the subject who could comment on this?
Bathrobe (talk) 03:42, 21 February 2008 (UTC)


I clarified what I meant on your talk page. Hanja is traditional Chinese. It was a writing system for spoken Korean prior to the 15th century. The Korean language is an Altaic language. You do not derive an Altaic language from a language that is in a completely different family.

"Chinese characters with Korean phonetics"

The context is simliar to Vietnamese who speak Vietnamese but use French/Latin to write. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Subvertmsm (talk • contribs) 04:16, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

For reference, the following is Subvertmsm's comment at my talk page:

You are right. Hanja are traditional chinese characters and i haven't removed it. It is still there.
The word hani does not exist at all. As in if you said hani to some Korean he/she would have ZERO idea what you were saying.
The phenomenon does exist but by nowhere near the extent the Chinese claim. There are words of sino origin, more specifically words of religious and scientific origin. However it is patently false to say sino-Korean words are of sino origin. Sino-Korean words are simply words that can be written in Hanja.
Sino-Korean words are spoken in Korean, have been in the Korean spoken language since Koreans arrived. Traditional Chinese was the only written language 2000 years ago ergo the use of hanja(traditional chinese). The context I'm describing is similiar to the Vietnamese language, which is spoken in Vietnamese but written with French.
This is what i mean by "Korean spoken language written using Chinese characters". Languages are usually spoken first before a writing system is developed.
(Comment by Subvertmsm)
Bathrobe (talk) 08:23, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for your comments.
Actually, I've been mystified for some time by the confusion in what hanja actually refers to. At a superficial level, it seems equivalent to Hanzi or Kanji. But Koreans appear to use the term in a completely different sense, namely, to refer to a certain type of language, not the characters that are used to write it. In both Chinese and Japanese, hanzi/kanji refer only to the characters themselves, not to the vocabulary, style of language, or writing system as a whole.
If Korean usage in this regard is different from Chinese and Japanese usage, it's important to indicate that in the introductory paragraph. The current introduction is highly confusing because it's impossible to tell what hanja refers to. Your definition implies that hanja refers to the Korean spoken language (as opposed to what? a specific written style?), that it refers to the spoken language written in Chinese characters (so what happens when hanja and hangul are mixed together -- is this referred to as "hanja" or "hangul" or what?). The definition seems to imply that all Korean ("the Korean spoken language") can be written in Chinese characters, and when it is, that spoken language is called "hanja". It is totally confusing.
This confusion emerges in the following comment:
There are words of sino origin, more specifically words of religious and scientific origin. However it is patently false to say sino-Korean words are of sino origin. Sino-Korean words are simply words that can be written in Hanja."
Could you explain what Korean words can be written in hanja? That is, exactly what are the conditions for a word to be written in hanja? If they are not words of sino origin, then what words are we talking about? Native Korean words that someone has decided to write in hanja?
Incidentally, Vietnamese is not "written with French". It's written in a romanisation that was originally adapted from Portuguese.
Bathrobe (talk) 04:27, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

The following copied from my talk page:

Kanji and Hanja are not used for the same purposes. Hanja represents Korean phonetics, Kanji is Japanese.
I think you mean the opposite. Kanji and what not represent much more than just a series of characters. The entire Japanese writing system and much of its vocabulary is Chinese. In Korean, hanja represents nothing other than the assigned sounds and have almost no correlation to Chinese.
For example, if you ask a Chinese person to try to learn Japanese, he/she will find an enormous amount of similarities. Ask him to learn Korean, with or without Hanja, it will be difficult and Hanja will not help at all.
The quote, seems really clear to me, although I see your ambiguity.
Hanja is a bit abstract, there is no meaning or logic behind it because the Chinese language has no alphabet while Korean does. Modern Chinese, when you are learning it, is learned by memorization. It doesn't follow like a language with an alphabet.
Most hanja can be written for proper nouns or words that dont exist. If the Chinese invented the computer, we wouldn't have a Korean word for it. We'd make up a word, and then there would be hanja attached to it to clarify it. Subvertmsm (talk) 05:00, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I would really appreciate some clarification of the following:
Kanji and Hanja are not used for the same purposes. Hanja represents Korean phonetics, Kanji is Japanese. Could you provide some examples to show what this statement means?
I think you mean the opposite. Kanji and what not represent much more than just a series of characters. The entire Japanese writing system and much of its vocabulary is Chinese. In Korean, hanja represents nothing other than the assigned sounds and have almost no correlation to Chinese. Similarly for this. Please give examples of what you mean. You are saying that Chinese characters in Korean represent only sound (and not meaning?), and that characters as used in Korean have no correlation to Chinese. So characters like 國家 only represent a sound in Korean (presumably kookka) but represent a meaning in Japanese? Or do you mean something else?
For example, if you ask a Chinese person to try to learn Japanese, he/she will find an enormous amount of similarities. Ask him to learn Korean, with or without Hanja, it will be difficult and Hanja will not help at all. So you are saying there is little vocabulary in Korean with Chinese cognates? Could you back that up? I've seen plenty of words in Korean that are cognate with Chinese or Japanese vocabulary (like 國家, for instance). If the existence of such vocabulary is of no use to a Chinese speaker, then please tell me why not. For example, there is a Korean word 기계, written in hanja as 機械. It is related to the Chinese word 機械 and the Japanese word 機械（きかい）. Could you tell me exactly why this kind of word would be of no use to a Chinese speaker learning Korean?
Hanja is a bit abstract, there is no meaning or logic behind it because the Chinese language has no alphabet while Korean does. This makes no sense at all. If you knew anything about Chinese characters you wouldn't say they have "no meaning or logic". True, hanja are not a phonetic alphabet, but that doesn't mean it has no meaning or logic. I have great difficulty understanding what you are trying to say.
Most hanja can be written for proper nouns or words that dont exist. If the Chinese invented the computer, we wouldn't have a Korean word for it. We'd make up a word, and then there would be hanja attached to it to clarify it. It seems to me that this is the same for most languages. Whether the word is "made up" or borrowed, there has to be some kind of coinage of new words. But I can't see what you mean when you say hanja can be attached to "clarify" a word. Hanja surely can't be attached to anything and everything. Are you trying to say you can just make a word (e.g. to make up a nonsense word, sel-bug-leg), and attach the characters 電腦 to it and say, "these hanja have been attached to the word sel-bug-leg to "clarify" its meaning"? I find that hard to believe. My understanding is that hanja can only be attached if a word is created from Chinese-based morphemes. These are morphemes that were originally borrowed from Chinese and have a hanja associated with them. For example, the morpheme "kook" in Korean has the hanja 國 associated with it and means 'country'. The morpheme "kook" itself was borrowed from Chinese at some stage. Please tell me if my understanding is incorrect.
Bathrobe (talk) 06:27, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I've reverted Subvertmsm's edits pending a sensible response to the above questions. This editor seems to be coming from somewhere, but I can't figure out where. There seems to be some kind of nationalist agenda to try and deny any connection between the use of Chinese characters (hanja) in Korean and Chinese characters in Chinese itself. If this is what Subvertsms means, I would be grateful for some examples to back this thesis up, rather than the increasingly vague, puzzling, and frankly nonsensical assertions that he is using in his replies.
Bathrobe (talk) 09:04, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Hanja means 'Chinese character', just as kanji and hanzi do. In all languages, there is confusion between spoken and written language, as well as their units (phonemes and graphemes), with for example the English word nymph being said to contain no vowels. Then there's the problem of translation: if the concepts are a little blurred in your native language, and a little blurred in the target language, and worse yet don't correspond exactly, it's easy to come out the other end speaking gibberish. That said, I don't know that the confusion is any greater in Korean than in any other language.

The history, however, is different. The Japanese used to write in Chinese, with diacritics to help in comprehension, just as the Koreans did. However, they switched to writing Japanese (in Chinese characters) a millennium ago, much earlier than the Koreans. We hardly know anything of Middle Korean because there are so few records: Almost everything was written in Chinese, not just in Chinese characters. Therefore, there may be a greater sense in Korea than in Japan that 漢字 represent the Chinese language. My understanding is that the use of hanja for lexical roots and hangeul for grammatical endings is modeled after Japanese kanji/kana and only dates to the Japanese occupation. With that history, I can see how hanja could still be seen as a foreign system, used today only to clarify Sino-Korean words which aren't clear from context - a bit like the use of the Greek alphabet when writing technical English, or the use of romāji in Japanese. This is different from the use of kanji, which are even used to distinguish nuances of meaning in native Japanese vocabulary. I don't believe hanja are ever used that way. Both languages, however, have huge amounts of Chinese-derived vocabulary, though some Sino-Korean vocab is Japanese in origin (as are many of those same terms in Chinese). kwami (talk) 09:45, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Thank you, Kwamikagami, for that commentary. Perhaps I was too hasty in reverting his edits. It would have been better to leave them up there for all to comment on.
The differences in the history of writing systems in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese seem to be very relevant and important. There is perhaps a need in the articles to add more information from that angle. Otherwise JKV might be considered to have somehow "parallel" histories. Your commentary suggests that this is far from the case.
I'd be very grateful if you could have a look at Subvertmsm's edits and see which of them are well-motivated and which are not. I reverted them all because he seemed to be talking more and more nonsense. He seems unable to distinguish between (1) Hanja = Chinese characters, (2) associated Chinese-based morphemes (such morphemes being historically associated with a particular Chinese character), and (3) vocabulary formed from Chinese-based morphemes (which was not necessarily borrowed directly from Chinese but was to a large extent based on Chinese morphological rules). For instance, 'telescope' was not borrowed from Greek, but it is still based on Greek roots. That is largely how I see "Sino-Korean", although the fact that hanja were the medium of both borrowing and coinage complicates things considerably in comparison with the European situation.
The concept of "Korean phonetics" also gets thrown in, although it's hard to see what "Korean phonetics" is supposed to mean. It seems to me to be referring to the Korean pronunciation of Chinese morphemes, so we still get back to an etymological connection with Chinese. I'm left scratching my head over Subvertmsm's edits. (Also, I suspect he is a sockpuppet for Aneconomist).
Bathrobe (talk) 10:17, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

No, I think you were right to remove them. Whether it's a language barrier or if he's just not clear on the concepts, they were not appropriate for public display. Maybe if he can explain himself here, we can work his points into the article.

I doubt I will, though. I've got other articles I'm working on that are taking all of my time, and which no one else is working on, whereas Korean is a popular topic. And there a lots of people who know much better than I! kwami (talk) 11:54, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

English is my first language and my english is fine. You seem to be having trouble following things in general.
You have been talking nonsense since your first reply with alot skepticism. Korean phonetics are not something I added in, it was already there. Words written in hanja are pronounced in Korean not Chinese.
I've told you atleast twice already that Hanja is traditional Chinese, yet you keep repeating this notion that hanja isn't Chinese.
Hanja has nothing to do with Chinese-based morphemes. The morphemes that Hanja represents in the Chinese language are not the same morphemes in Korean.
"kook" does not mean country it means soup. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Subvertmsm (talk • contribs) 22:01, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
Hanja has nothing to do with Chinese-based morphemes. The morphemes that Hanja represents in the Chinese language are not the same morphemes in Korean. This is the heart of the problem with your edits. Until you can clarify, with examples, exactly how "the morphemes that Hanja represents in the Chinese language are not the same morphemes in Korean", your edits will continue to be reverted.
For a start, please tell me what you think 韓國 means in Korean, and how it is pronounced. I'm happy to go along with your romanisation.
According to what you say above :
(1) 國 (a hanja) is "traditional Chinese".
(2) 國 represents Korean phonetics and is read in Korean
(3) In Korean, 國 represents nothing other than the assigned sounds and have almost no correlation to Chinese
(4) The morpheme that 國 represents in Korean is not the morpheme that 國 represents in Chinese.
Well, what exactly does 國 represent in Korean? I think we deserve a decent explanation. What exactly IS the connection between 國 in Chinese and 國 in Korean, and what is the connection of 國 to the Korean language?
According to what you are saying, 國 (which merely represents a sound) can therefore be used to clarify the word guk (soup) in Korean. And if 國 (i.e. guk) means "soup", then the Korean name for Korea means "Han Soup"? Please come back with some specific explanations.
Bathrobe (talk) 01:28, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Subvertmsm, it's a little rich that you tell us we're speaking nonsense, when you don't seem to know the meanings of the words you're using. For one thing, it appears you either don't know, or don't know how to express, the difference between language and writing.
When you say kook (I assume that's supposed to be guk - I suggest we stick to standard Romanization) doesn't mean 'country' it means 'soup', I assume you mean that guk 'country' is Sino-Korean and guk 'soup' is native Korean. It would be helpful if you actually explained what you meant, rather than simply saying things are 'wrong'. kwami (talk) 04:57, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Guk/kook by itself means soup. Guk in the word tae han min guk is Korea, its a proper noun. Guk simply does not mean country. I dont know where you got this from, but its utter nonsense. Something that doesn't exist doesn't require an explanation. Explain to me why anyone should be listening to either of you on this topic? Its clear neither of you have any idea what Hanja is, nor do you speak Hangul, Hanja or Chinese.Subvertmsm (talk) 09:24, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I can only assume you're trolling, so I won't bother any further with you, and will revert anything you edit unless you start acting seriously.
And BTW, of course I don't speak hanja or hangul. Neither do you. Or maybe you speak romanization as well? kwami (talk) 10:46, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Thank, Subvermsm you for setting my mind at rest. You obviously know nothing about Chinese or Chinese characters, or even Korean, it seems. The character 國 means 'country', and it's read 국 (guk). If you do a little checking you'll find it's used in other Korean words, as well. Like nation (國家 국가), United Kingdom (英國 영국), militarism (軍國主義 군국주의), great power (大國 대국), people of a nation (國民 국민), national interest (國益 국익), national policy (國策 국책), international (國際 국제), foreign country (外國 외국) etc. If you don't know that 국 has this meaning, or that 國 means country, you have absolutely no business editing this article.
Bathrobe (talk) 10:47, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Neither of you have any idea what you are saying. Neither of you speak Korean or have any knowledge of Hanja yet here you are editing it. Its no wonder there are no citations here. The word for country in Korean is nara not guk. Guk is soup. You are basing your knowledge on patterns you have seen on the internet. Truepropagnda (talk) 23:39, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Apparently a sockpuppet for Subvertmsm. Amazing how he knows all but is incapable of expressing anything. —kwami (talk) 00:24, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
I've shown above the fact that 國 guk meaning "country" is a valid morpheme in Korean. 國 is a hanja, i.e., "Chinese character". Despite your not having the slightest clue about the hanja 國 and what it means, you try and edit the article about hanja and accuse other people of having no idea of what they are saying. The problem is not other people: it's your lack of knowledge about hanja and continued attempts to edit the article despite this. Before vandalising the article again, please go out and ask a knowledgeable Korean what they know about hanja. I have no idea of your background, but you may be surprised at what you learn.
Bathrobe (talk) 01:09, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
Bathrobe, I doubt it's worth our time to reason with this guy. If he were capable of that level of thought, he would be able to express himself coherently. We don't need to explain ourselves when we revert him for defacing the article. kwami (talk) 02:39, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

No the problem is you have no idea, but you believe you know based on what you have seen on the internet. You are relying on everyone else's lack of knowledge in the matter. The simple fact is guk does not mean country. Hani does not mean do. Neither of you have absolutely any idea what you are saying here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Truepropagnda (talk • contribs) 05:18, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

I can't understand what your problem is. You added an entire section, the History section, that had more detailed information than what was there before (although the assertion that Koreans at the Japanese court supervised the creation of Manyogana needs to be supported).
Then you destroy your own credibility by replacing one section with "unreferenced bullshit by chinks and japs".
While you continue to behave like this, I can't see why anyone should take you seriously.
By the way, have you checked with any Korean linguists or Korean people with a good knowledge of Korean language and culture about the use of hanja in Korean?
Bathrobe (talk) 05:51, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
Don't waste your time, Bathrobe. I just blocked our sockpuppet for his vandalism.
Since the Japanese acquired literacy (as well as Buddhism and much of their governmental structure) primarily through visiting Korean scholars, there is a good chance that they did supervise the creation of man'yogana. However, I fail to see the point of including that here. kwami (talk) 06:11, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
I agree that it's quite possible that Koreans supervised the creation of manyogana. It's probably relevant here, too, given that the history of Korean and Japanese writing systems seems to be intertwined. But I would prefer a cited source over conjecture.
Anyway, since this user and his sockpuppets seem completely immune to reason and prefer making wholesale changes without providing proper reasons, I agree with the decision to block. I don't think it will stop here, though.
One thing that rankles is the amount of time that I (or we) have wasted trying to reason with this editor. There are better things to do in life than spending time phrasing questions and responses in order to try and figure out where people like this are coming from. It's deflating to find out that they are simply ignorant, bigoted, unconstructive, and a total waste of time.
Bathrobe (talk) 07:44, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Pronunciation question

Can a Korean language expert help me with the Seolleongtang article? I'm trying to determine why, if the second hanja is pronounced "neong," the soup is pronounced "seolleongtang." Is this just a colloqualism or is it the correct/standard pronuncation. Any help would be great--please respond on the "Discussion" page of the Seolleongtang article. Badagnani 02:05, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

a syllable ending in "l" followed by a syllable starting in "n" in written form, will assimilate to an "l" sound. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.198.239.57 (talk) 00:37, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

"This article contains Korean text"

I for one despise these blatantly obvious, space-wasting templates. Do we really assume our readers so dull that they would really come an article whose first sentence states: "Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters" and expect that it contains no hangul or hanja at all? Worse yet, it pushes the infoboxes which actually contain information further down the page. What's the point? cab (talk) 10:09, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

What about "This article contains English text" since almost all texts of the article are written in English. :-) Well, the templates are for those who do not set up their browser with UTF, so the Asian characters are shown as boxes, so although the templates are not that ideal. -Caspian blue 10:47, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Personally I'd propose that this whole series of templates get made into hatnotes instead. At least that'll take up less space and mess up the layout less. Though I suspect I'm the only one angry about this issue and everyone else will respond with a resounding "whatever, dude". =) Let me go figure out where to make such a proposal ... cab (talk) 14:31, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Hanja on Won

I recently found old North Korean won notes from 1947, and they are almost completely written in Hanja (Traditional-Chinese Characters) and not in Chosŏn'gul. This article does not explain much on this subject. --82.134.154.25 (talk) 17:13, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Introduction of Hanja

Does anybody know when Hanja were first used to write Korean? I mean to have read somewhere that it was ca. 6th century AD. Maybe this info should be in the text as well. The text implies that it was at the same time with the introduction of Buddhism to Korea, but a clearer date would probably be welcome by many readers.--Mycomp (talk) 02:04, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Chinese ideograms are believed to have been brought into Korea sometime before the second century BC." (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2800.htm) However, this only means that Koreans started to write Chinese language in Hanja then. The currently known earliest evidence (correct me if I'm wrong) of Korean language written in Hanja via idu is a stone engraving called Imsinseogiseog (임신서기석/壬申誓記石) made in either 522 or 612 AD. 24.83.45.98 (talk) 06:21, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Hanja on Korean Wikipedia

Are Hanja used on Korean Wikipedia?--达伟 (talk) 19:05, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Hanja is not used on the Korean Wikipedia

merger proposal

The person who proposed the merger has (incorrectly) posted this comment at the Sino-Korean talk page. I'm posting it here for reference:

I suggested a merge of this article into the Hanja article because:
1. Both this article and the Hanja article suggest or imply that "Hanja" and "Sino-Korean" are the same thing. In the Hanja article, the first sentence is, "Hanja, or hanmun, sometimes translated as Sino-Korean characters or just Chinese characters, are what Chinese characters (hànzì) are called in Korean", where "Sino-Korean characters" are linked to this article.
2. This article is too short to stand on its own.
It's been explained to me that Hanja and Sino-Korean are two different things. But it still remains that there's not much content on this article and I think it should be merged, as a section, into either the Hanja article or Korean language.
This was posted by Hong Qi Gong


support Appleby 05:06, 13 March 2006 (UTC) they are different things, but sino-korean could be adequately covered by a paragraph or short subsection here, removing much overlap and giving readers a more complete context for both topics. overall, i think we should be aiming to streamline, make consistent, & more logically organize the overlapping contents of Korean language, Hangul, Hanja, and Sino-Korean & all the hard-to-find sub-topic articles. this is a good first step. Appleby 04:34, 14 March 2006 (UTC)


oppose. Having read the two articles, it appears that there is considerable overlap. However, this appears to be due to a failure to make the important conceptual distinction between Hanja (meaning Chinese characters, i.e., the characters used to write the Korean language) and Sino-Korean vocabulary as a segment of the Korean vocabulary. In this sense, Sino-Korean is opposed to native Korean vocabulary (固有語). And as the "Vocabulary" section of the Hanja article explains, Sino-Korean vocabulary is not necessarily Chinese. In some cases it was borrowed from Japanese. What is more, Sino-Korean is not necessarily written with hanja. In fact, modern Korean makes very sparing use of Hanja, so that in fact much Sino-Korean vocabulary is written with hangul.

I would suggest that the section on "Vocabulary" should be moved to Sino-Korean. That would help make the conceptual difference clearer. And I think it is important to maintain the distinction; it is too easy to fall into the trap of equating characters to words and thus vocabulary. (This is a particularly seductive notion in Chinese because there is really no other way of writing Chinese than in characters, and characters are needed to tie the various dialects together. In fact, it's quite possible to have Sino-xxxx without using Hanja, Kanji, or Chinese characters at all. See, for instance, the article on Sino-Vietnamese, a huge segment of the Vietnamese vocabulary that is no longer written with characters at all.)

The proposal to merge the content to Korean language makes somewhat more sense, but even in this case I would suggest the vocabulary section would be better moved to the Korean language article. (If you read the Korean language article, you will find that there is, in fact, a clear distinction made between Sino-Korean and Hanja.)

Finally, I would suggest that the word 'Sino-Korean' should be removed from the definition of Hanja, as it seems to be causing some confusion. Bathrobe 03:45, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

In Korean:
  • jungguk-eo: chinese language
  • hanja: chinese characters, including those used in china (traditional & simplified), korea, japan
  • hanja-mal or hanja-eo: words consisting of chinese characters (written in hanja or hangul), used in china, korea, japan
  • hanmun: 1. chinese writing; 2. chinese classics studied in china, korea, japan Appleby 06:59, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Appleby, if your definitions given here are correct, then the definition of Hanja as 'Sino-Korean characters' (which I've deleted in the meantime) was incorrect. Your definition suggests that Hanja should refer to all Chinese characters, regardless of language. This is useful information and probably should be mentioned in the article. In fact, kanji in Japanese refers to all Chinese characters, just as hanja does in Korean, but many people want to restrict the meaning to characters as used in Japanese (see Menchi's comment in the page history where he changed "kanji" to "hanzi" -- the thrust appears to be that kanji can't be used to refer to characters used in Chinese, and must refer only to Japanese).

The word 'hanja-mal' or 'hanja-eo': I am curious whether it includes all words written in Chinese characters in China, Korea, and Japan. The reason I ask is because there are many kun'yomi words in Japanese that are written in Kanji, although they would never be considered Sino-Japanese. Also, does this class of word include Chinese words that are not found in Korean or Japanese? An example that springs to mind is 洗衣機 (washing machine), which I know is not used in Japanese and I suspect is not used in Korean. Would this be considered 'hanja-eo'?

'Hanmun' in your definition is equivalent to the meaning of kanbun. You also give it the meaning 'Chinese writing'. If that is the case, then should it be removed as a synonym of "hanja" from the beginning of the Hanja article. I'm not quite clear on this one.

It seems that the article as it stands has a lot of problems. Bathrobe 07:23, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

those are the definition from general dictionaries, but i would like specialists/linguists to comment? you bring up good points, as whether hanja-mal/hanja-eo would encompass chinese words used exclusively in china. in common conversations, that would be referred to as "jungguk-eo," and probably not hanja-mal/hanja-eo, despite the dictionary definition. but i do agree the intro needs to be changed, as hanja definitely =/= hanmun. Appleby 07:29, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
I've made quite a few changes to both articles. One big change I made is to move "Vocabulary" from Hanja to Sino-Korean.
I appreciate that we are discussing whether or not to merge the articles and that this change may appear to be moving in the opposite direction. However, the reason for making the changes is to demonstrate how the two articles cover conceptually quite distinct notions. Naturally, if it is decided to merge the two articles, I am quite happy to see the information re-integrated into a single article. Even if it is decided to merge, however, I think there is a need to clarify the difference between hanja and hanjaeo (Sino-Korean).
Bathrobe

bathrobe, thanks for putting in the work to improve these articles. my concern was that the non-expert reader be able to easily find and get the gist of the big picture, and proper context for each sub-topic, without a lot of overlapping, hard-to-find sub-articles. my feeling, as of now, is that hanja/hanmun/hanja-eo/sino-korean can be better discussed in one well-organized, cleanly-written article. i could be wrong, though. Appleby 17:42, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Appleby, I think we need input from someone with expertise in Korean linguistics. You yourself are (I presume) Korean, but you say you are not an expert. I'm not a speaker of Korean at all, although I'm familiar with Chinese and Japanese. The person who suggested the merger, Hong Qi Gong, is Hong Kong Chinese, and I think the Chinese (or Cantonese) way of looking at this may be slightly different from the Korean way of doing so. Do we have any people on Wikipedia with expertise in this area?
Bathrobe 05:46, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I've already asked for input at hangul & korean language article talk pages, but nobody's biting. guess it's slow season. I am fully fluent in korean, but I'm no linguist, so I wouldn't be confident about detailed scholarly usage, & don't have a strong opinion on the merger, just sounded like a good idea to me. please don't feel like I'm holding you back from working on the articles. (but I do know hanja & hanmun are different things) Appleby 06:28, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm inclined to support this merger, as providing a better basis for a good article. Some info on the matter of hanja vs. Chinese characters:

  • Writers on Korean language education often distinguish between hanjagwon learners (those from Taiwan, China, and Japan) and non-hanjagwon learners. The term hanja, in this context, clearly refers to Chinese characters in general.
  • The couple of Korean-Korean dictionaries I have at hand just now concur in defining hanja as "중국어를 표기하는 중국 고유의 문자," which pretty strongly indicates that the word's scope is not restricted to Sino-Korean, and is in fact synonymous with Chinese character.

In sum, it seems like the distinction between hanja and (traditional) Chinese characters has been adopted by English speakers, but is (generally) not present in Korean. This makes a bit of sense, since a) there is nothing quite comparable to the kanji/hanzi distinction in Korean, and b) English speakers would never think of referring to non-Korean uses of the characters as "hanja." I think this makes a fairly strong case for considering that "hanja" does not constitute an independent topic outside of Sino-Korean. -- Visviva 05:29, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Like most everyone else here, I'm no linguist, and my Korean is still very shaky. Initially I was absolutely opposed to the merge, as hanja and sino-korean vocabulary are clearly distinct concepts. My biggest concern is that many articles link to hanja in the sense of the characters exclusively, and they have nothing to do with linguistics. Think about the reader who has no knowledge of East Asian languages, looking up topics like Hyundai or Kim Jong-Il. I also think there needs to be some expansion, on the subject of archaic uses of hanja - specifically, that before the promulgation of hangeul, hanja could be used to write native vocabulary in addition to sino-korean (much like Japanese kun'yomi). I do agree with some of the points above, though, namely that in a modern context, for the English-language reader, hanja is inextricably linked with sino-korean words. I'm still going to have to oppose; but if this merge does go through, at the least, the merged article should include a link at the very top of the article to Chinese character. AKADriver 16:24, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


Don't confuse language and script. 漢字 are characters, and used in many languages. Sino-Korean is 漢字語, Korean words built from 漢字. Koreans will use the word "漢字" to designate the characters used in any of the language that uses them. -- dda

Clarification sought

On the one hand, the article says:

Hanja are still taught in separate courses in South Korean high schools, apart from the normal Korean language curriculum. Formal hanja education begins in grade 7 (junior high school) and continues until graduation from senior high school in grade 12. A total of 1,800 hanja are taught: 900 for junior high, and 900 for senior high (starting in grade 10).

On the other, it says:

In 1988, 80% of one sample of people without a college education "evinced no reading comprehension of any but the simplest, most common hanja" when reading mixed-script passages.

Does this mean that all those 80% of people didn't go to high school (seems highly unlikely in a country like South Korea), or are those hanja courses optional and only a few people take them (which is not the impression one gets from the first passage)? Can anyone clarify this? 86.183.171.248 (talk) 02:20, 3 June 2010 (UTC).

Or simply that they learned them and later forgot them. I can't remember lots of stuff from high school either; that doesn't prove that I didn't go to high school. cab (talk) 02:25, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
Well, you could be right I suppose, but it's hard to believe that after studying for five years, 80% of people would later forget virtually every character they learned. I suppose if you never used any of them again for many years ... ? 86.183.171.248 (talk) 02:58, 3 June 2010 (UTC).
I too disagree with the accuracy of this information. I know three different individuals who moved from South Korea as teenagers (all currently under the age of 25). The first one came in eighth grade in the US, so she only knows how to write her Chinese name. She said that Hanja is very rarely used but the schools in her area taught them beginning in seventh grade until high school and perhaps university. The second one came in ninth grade, and he said he can't write any of them, "I don't know what Wikipedia says, but it's only some schools that teach that." The third one moved at age 22, so she already knows a lot, but I did not ask how she learned so many. Can anybody actually edit this article to reflect the accuracy of South Korean students learning Hanja? Thanks. Estheroliver (talk) 01:09, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
'80% of one sample of people without a college education' does not mean 80% of people didn't go to high school. For one, the words 'college' and 'high school' are not equivalent in non-American English, the meaning of which only the author of the study can truly clarify. Secondly, the study took a sample of people who did not attend 'college' (I presume this means university, rather than high school). That means 100% of this sample did not attend college (sorry for pointing out the obvious), but does not represent the proportion of people in South Korea who did not attend college. We do not know how large this sample is, but 80% of this sample could not decipher more complex Hanja.219.89.229.152 (talk) 04:19, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
I think you may have missed the point. "Does this mean that all those 80% of people didn't go to high school" is not suggesting that "college" = "high school". It is saying that, since hanja are taught for five or six years at high school, and since 80% of non-graduates apparently have virtually zero knowledge of them, then this seems to suggest that all those 80% never learned them, i.e. never went to high school. 81.151.36.209 (talk) 03:47, 30 January 2011 (UTC).

Also, we have in the article "In South Korea, hanja are used most frequently in academic literature, where they often appear without the equivalent hangul spelling." and "Hanja are also often used in newspaper headlines", so does that mean that the 80% who only know the simplest / most common hanja cannot make any sense at all of academic literature? Does it mean that they can't read newspaper headlines, or that newspapers only use very simple/common characters? I have read this whole article more than once and I am still somewhat confused about the level of hanja usage/understanding in modern Korea. 81.159.106.26 (talk) 14:56, 25 February 2011 (UTC).

Usage of "hanja"

We should decide on a uniform way to use "hanja" for the purposes of the article. Several questions:

1. Capitalize or not
2. Singular or plural (i.e. should the term "hanja" refer to an individual character, or the whole system?)

My personal inclination is not to capitalize, and to use hanja to refer to the whole system. Individual characters could just be called "characters." --Reuben 21:23, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

3 Hanja can be used as a name(my name is Hanja) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.210.170.119 (talk) 14:29, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

i agree it should refer to the system as a whole, as a collective noun. casual googling seems to indicate that it is generally capitalized, however. aren't the names of other script systems treated as capitalized proper nouns? Appleby 21:35, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that's a general rule, unless they contain other proper nouns (e.g. Greek alphabet, Cyrillic). However, Wikipedia articles on other writing systems seem to be split. Some of them are general categories rather than specific writing systems, and therefore not capitalized: runes, abugida, alphabet, cuneiform. Some are lower case even when specific: hieroglyphics, kanji, hiragana. Some are capitalized: Bhijimol, Brahmi, Glagolitic. In summary: I can't find any general rule about it! If googling shows it mostly capitalized, let's go with that. --Reuben 04:50, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

"Opinion surveys show that the South Korean public do not consider hanja literacy essential"

Exactly what timeframe is this sentence referring to, and which surveys are they? Earlier this year, the Segye Ilbo conducted a survey, to which only 15.4% considered Hanja education unnecessary, and 10.7% considered Hanja education irrelevant to the Korean language (original scan and English translation here). Surely this sentence isn't an all-inclusive claim? The wording here should be brushed up a bit. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 15:04, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Mistake about Shanghainese pronunciation

In Hanja#Pronunciation, I see the following sentence: "For example, 印刷 "print" is yìnshuā in Mandarin Chinese and inswae (인쇄) in Korean, but it is pronounced insue in Shanghainese (a Wu Chinese dialect)."

But actually the pronunciation of 印刷 "print" in Shanghainese is inseh /in.səʔ/. (Ref. 吴音小字典 (Wu-Language Dictionary)) Plus, it couldn't be insue or similar forms in older Shanghainese. I don't know why the original editor said it was "insue", and take this as an example of the statement above ("The pronunciation of hanja in Korean is not identical to the way they are pronounced in modern Chinese, particularly Mandarin, although some Chinese dialects and Korean share similar pronunciations for some characters."). Maybe it was simply a mistake of the Wikipedian, but I'm not sure.

Should I delete the example if I'm right? —— Queen of GEMS (talk) 15:24, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

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