I said "for those Chinese-character-words". Only implying to specific kind of words in Korean.

Because there are more vowels compare to English and there's another way to aspirate consonants.

There's only one hangeul.

Yes, I noticed that about the vowels. But at least there's only one alphabet. In that aspect, it's easier then japanese at lease, lol

I don't understand this. I'm sorry.


It seems actually easier in a sense to pronounce the words.

What do you mean by one alphabet?

@ komitsuki

there's no e in Hangul.

Really? Maybe it does depend person to person...

I meant, hangul is their only alphabet. I was looking up hanja, and it said pretty much that you only need it for historical documents, since even chinese-origin words are now mostly written in hangul.

There are two kinds of words in Korean:

1. native Korean words and foreign loanwords (approx. 30% of words)
2. Chinese-character-based words either from Korea, China and Japan (approx. 70%)

Because there are a lot of homophones (words that sound the same but has different meanings) in those Chinese-character-based words, you need Chinese characters to understand the precise meanings. If not, people learning Korean will have a hard time.

And besides, 98% of Koreans have names based on Chinese characters.

I'm only using the official romanization method endorsed by the South Korea's Ministry of Culture since the year 2000. This is what I'm used to because of the old McCune–Reischauer romanization system is extremely hard for native speakers and non-native speakers to understand.

I don't want people to say [han-GOOL] because it's a deliberately wrong pronunciation.

You need to memorize 1000-1200 chinese characters if you want to go to university.

You would have to be pretty darn fluent if you were attending university...
Do they really use hanja that much in day to day writing and stuff though?

hmm. maybe.

ah, ok.

There are Chinese origin words in Korean?

@ komi...

ah, ok... well, shouldn't they be able to pronounce it right, if they look up how?

Not today... but hanja is important when you use the dictionary or reading very formal papers.