Talk:Hanja

Introduction of Written Chinese

The first sentence of the History section ("A major motivation for the introduction of Chinese characters into Korea was the spread of Buddhism.") conflicts with Adoption_of_Chinese_literary_culture#Korea and the sources with in. In particular, in , we see that "Chinese graphs ... must be used in Korea as early as the first century BC" well before the large scale spread of Buddhism in Korea in the 4th century CE (see Korean_Buddhism#Historical_overview_and_development). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.180.132.127 (talk) 17:24, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

I don't see a conflict between both statements. It doesn't the "the only", but "a major". Prior to the 4th century, Chinese writing was not as extensively used in Korea as later, not on a large scale, and apparently more in the north than in the south. Similarly, Latin-based writing has been used in Korea for centuries, mostly by Europeans, but that doesn't mean that Latin-based literacy was ever introduced on a large scale. These are two completely different situations, and therefore assertions, so there is no contradiction. I've removed the tag. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:06, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

What you say is true about the word "major". My bigger issue is with the use of the word "introduction", because, as you've alluded to, it can mean introducing the script to the masses or literacy to a small group of literate elites. Given that this statement has no source nor does it clarify this distinction, I had put the tag there. If you still disagree, we can leave it off. Either way I would like to have a good source for such a sweeping opening statement.--140.180.132.127 (talk) 22:01, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

References

"Dubious" comment in pronunciation section

In response to the sentence in the pronunciation section of the article that "One obvious difference is the complete loss of tone from Korean while most Chinese dialects retain tone", there's a comment from June 2011 marking this as dubious, stating, "It is questionable whether Old Chinese had a tone system in 2nd–1st century BC, when the importation of hanja started. The notion of losing something that doesn't exist is absurd."

I've slightly edited the article by adding "standard" to "Korean" and removing "complete". There are two different things going on here: first, although it's true that Old Chinese wasn't tonal, that misses the point because that's orthogonal to whether Korean was tonal such that it "lost" tone. It's well accepted that Middle Korean was tonal (or at least had a pitch accent), and so it is accurate to say that Korean lost tone -- at least standard Korean, since some modern Korean dialects remain tonal (and this is setting aside whether the modern Seoul dialect, on which standard Korean is based, is becoming tonal again, as some have argued). Second, the importation of Hanja was not a one-off event. Old Chinese wasn't tonal, but Middle Chinese most certainly was, along with modern varieties of Chinese. So something that used to exist was indeed lost when modern standard Korean lost tone. Talu42 (talk) 19:44, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Languages

I have again reverted a change of the Languages field of the infobox from "Korean, Classical Chinese" to "Korean, Jejuan" to match the article contents: Hanja were used in Korea to write both Korean and Chinese, and there is no mention of (or source for) the Jeju language being written using Hanja. Kanguole 13:04, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Off-topic material in the lede

At the end of the second paragraph, it currently reads: By contrast, many of the Chinese characters currently in use in mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore have been simplified, and contain fewer strokes than the corresponding Hanja characters. In Japan, simplified forms of Chinese characters known as shinjitai were also enacted, but are not as extensive. During the 1970s, Singapore had also briefly enacted its own simplification campaign, but eventually adopted the standard simplification of mainland China to avoid confusion.

This looks like too much off-topic detail here, especially for the lede. It is of course important to say that due to the PRC-spelling reform, many Hanja characters are different from the ones that are now used by most Chinese speakers, but the information about Japan and Singapore is an unnecessary diversion IMHO, since this article is about Hanja, and not about what happened to traditional Chinese characters in the entire Sinosphere. Austronesier (talk) 17:38, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

About my edit

The original text states that During the 3rd century BC, Chinese migrations into the peninsula occurred due to war in northern China and the earliest archaeological evidence of Chinese writing are dated to this period. But it seems wrong. 梦随飞絮 (talk) 13:27, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

The original was correct. The first archaeological evidence of Chinese characters in Korea dates from the 3rd century BC. The first evidence in China is a millennium earlier, in the late Shang. There is a tradition of Shang migrations to Korea, but it hasn't been substantiated historically. Kanguole 14:42, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

Edit request

From my experience as a South Korean middle schooler, Hanja education has almost completely disappeared. Most students only know the most basic Hanja (Such as the Hanja for 바를 정 (正) which is used in place of tally marks in korea), leading to lots of problems when it comes to learning subjects that have many technical terms (such as 기술 class, where we learn about things related to technology, excluding computers) or learning Chinese (our school's secondary foreign language is Chinese, it's up to the school to decide). I believe this is either a recent change, as the teachers are still surprised when they realize how little Hanja we know. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 175.209.137.229 (talk • contribs) 08:56, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

That's interesting. To put it in the article, we'd need a reliable source – has this trend been discussed in newspapers or the like? (We can't base articles on personal experience.) Kanguole 09:58, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

I started thinking about this after seeing this article: https://www.chosun.com/culture-life/culture_general/2023/01/12/YSH2N6FMLFGQJKQQQT2OYU2X2Y/ where a rapper didn't know that "사흘" meant 3 days (which I didn't know too)

Reasoning: South Korea has two ways to say numbers, the "Pure Korean" way (how our ancestors counted before we learned Chinese) (하나 Hana, 둘 Dul, 셋 Set, 넷 Net, 다섯 Dasut ...) and the Sino-Korean way (It's basically Chinese pronunciation without Intonation, although it is a bit different since the two pronunciations have evolved independently for a thousand years) (일 Il, 이 Ee, 삼 Sam, 사 Sa, 오 Oh)

사흘 doesn't come from these counting ways, it's just a word that means "3 days". However, all the young-uns(such as myself) confuse this for meaning "4 days" as we think the 사 is the same 사 as the Hanja 사.

I translated this section that talks about the recent trends of the education of Hanja: (it's South Korea's version of wikipedia)

https://namu.wiki/w/%ED%95%9C%EC%9E%90%20%EA%B5%90%EC%9C%A1%20%EC%B0%AC%EB%B0%98%20%EB%85%BC%EC%9F%81#s-3

Hanja was considered a mandatory subject until the 7th Official Curriculum, and although it technically wasn't a mandatory subject, it was taught in the majority of schools (All schools have to teach mandatory subjects (mostly subjects in the CSAT) and it can choose which optional subjects to teach).

However, due to the subject becoming a discretionary subject along with the Gen Z Curriculum, most schools have phased out the subject, and has become a rare sight.

Around 2020, various issued surrounding the problem of the younger generation not knowing hanja have become prevalent, as most students weren't aware of various words used for teaching subjects, leaving students unable to understand classes.

This entire article is about arguments between whether Hanja education should be mandatory or not. I don't have enough time to go through it and find the relevant information that could be written here so maybe someone else can go through it... 175.209.137.229 (talk) 07:53, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

This is already covered in the article: Hanja#Decline_of_Hanja, Hanja#Education. I'll close the request. If you have content (with reliable sources) that is not in the article yet, feel free to reopen it. -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 16:17, 16 April 2023 (UTC)