# Learning Korean with a prior knowledge of Chinese



## ChristopherB

I'm just wondering whether anyone can tell me if there are any advantages one would have in crossing from Chinese to Korean, assuming one would like to learn both. Would my Chinese vocab and literacy alleviate the need to study hanja at all?


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## 조금만

For many learners of Korean, there is no need to study Hanja at all, so I don't think your knowledge of Chinese characters would remove any great obstacle which those lacking this advantage face (which your use of "alleviate" seems to suggest you might be anticipating).  

Where knowledge of Hanja does become indispensible is if you wish at some stage to read scholarly, legal, or advanced scientific texts of any kind, where key concepts and terms are often written in Hanja. Otherwise you will encounter Hanja in modern Korean only in some newspapers and as semantic discriminators in dictionaries. You will indeed find the latter very useful as soon as you begin to consult monolingual Korean dictionaries, so in that respect knowledge of Hanja  will help you follow the sense-divisions of dictionary entries much more readily than a learner without those advantages.

The other area where knowledge of Chinese will help is in recognising some of the Chinese-derived morphemes that are abundant in Korean, and so being able to discern their meaning when they combine with other Sino-Korean or native Korean morphemes into compounds. However, since most of the adoption of Chinese words into Korean took place many centuries ago (and even 19/20C additions to the Sino-Korean word stock mainly came via Japanese, so are also go back to modifications of medieval Chinese) the advantages in vocabulary acquisition are not as great as they might have been had Chinese, Japanese and Korean not all moved apart.  To get the full benefit here you would need to learn the Korean readings of the Hanja and be able to work backwards from those readings, seeing in your mind's eye the range of possible Hanja represented by a given Korean morpheme and being able to use that to arrive at the possible meanings of the word in front of you.  A Korean IME driven by a Korean keyboard with a dedicated Hanja key would let you get that benefit, for machine-readable texts, without needing to learn all the Korean readings. If you enter a Hangeul character and press the Hanja key, the IME will put up a picklist of possible  Hanja for which that Hangeul is a reading. This facility is of course actually intended as a means of entering Hanja into Korean texts, but it can also come in useful as a lookup tool for those who have learned the core meanings of common Chinese characters via another language.

But for anyone who views lexis as the least important aspect of language learning (as I personally do) knowledge of Chinese is no more a  help to learning Korean than, say, knowledge of Ancient Greek. The grammar and syntax of Korean are highly distinctive, with the only other language that gives learners a substantial start in grasping them being Japanese. That said, an English native speaker who had mastered Chinese grammar would have one important learning experience under their belt, namely the absolute need to release the grip of Indo-European grammatical structures on their mind. Anyone who has done that once in order to come to terms with Chinese grammar should find it somewhat easier to do it again when learning Korean, even though the structures to which they would be adapting their grammatical perceptions this time around would be as different from those of Chinese as they are from those of English.

All this of course leaves aside the (not insignificant) sense in which learning a language also involves learning a culture.  Korean culture, though highly distinctive in itself, is in many respects closely intertwined with Chinese culture and traditions. Someone who has a good knowledge of Chinese culture will find that many things in Korean texts make perfect sense which would remain opaque to a Westerner even after looking up what the words mean. This undoubtedly gives a boost to learning Korean, though it is indeed cultural knowledge of Chinese traditions, not specifically linguistic knowledge of how those traditions are expressed in the Chinese language, that is providing the assistance.


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## ChristopherB

Fantastic answer, thanks a lot.



조금만 said:


> To get the full benefit here you would need to learn the Korean readings of the Hanja and be able to work backwards from those readings, seeing in your mind's eye the range of possible Hanja represented by a given Korean morpheme and being able to use that to arrive at the possible meanings of the word in front of you.



I see, so my Chinese would help with dictionary clarifications and the like, but I would need to do additional study to get the meanings of the hanja when they are "disguised" as hangul. I have found one particular book "How to Master Korean Vocabulary" which may solve this problem:

* 권 This document(券) gives you the authority(權) to encourage(勸) by fist(拳). 
* 매 Each(每) and every(每) store tries to attract(魅) buyers(買) and sellers(賣). 
* 술 Drinking liquor(술) is a form of art(術) that requires skill(術). 
* 심 It takes a deep(深) mind(心) to examine(審) the heart(心) of a judge(審). 
* 태 A big(泰) lazy(怠) pregnant(胎) woman with an attitude(態) is not the greatest(太) situation(態).

Do you think that would be a reasonable method to get the meanings of the hanja as they would appear in exclusively hangul text? Obviously, I would ignore the actual characters since I would have their meanings from Chinese.


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## 조금만

Yes indeed, that's a very clever little book (and the fact that it is indeed little, so it fits nicely in a laptop case for airport etc reading etc is a point in its favour). I hesitate to recommend it to all learners though, because the title, and the introduction and publisher's blurb, vastly overstate what it does. There is a whole lot more to "mastering" Korean vocabulary than learning mnemonics that let you recall the Hanja for common polysemic morphemes.  But for people like yourself, who know the characters already visually and semantically, it offers a very viable way to build vocabulary quickly and to make sense of items you encounter when there's no dictionary to hand.

You might also want to consider the Handbook of Korean Vocabulary by Mihoo Choo and W. O'Grady (Honolulu 1966, ISBN 978-0824818159). Again a slightly misleading title, in that it actually focusses on identifying Sino-Korean morphemes as vocabulary building blocks (though it also has a section covering the way that pure Korean roots for which there are, of course, no Hanja also follow similar combinatory principles).  But once more, although knowledge of Chinese characters from another language isn't essential to make use of this book, it certainly helps see what the authors are getting at and how recognition of Chinese-derived roots helps learners see patterns in Korean lexis.


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