How to write in Korean

Korean is a rather peculiar language, close to Japanese, Chinese, languages ​​of Ancient India, the Urals, Altai. 60 million people speak and write on it. And although the language itself is more than three thousand years old, writing appeared only in the middle of the XV century, and spelling and literary norms were approved only in the XX. To quickly learn how to write Korean, you need to have at least a minimal understanding of Chinese. And also to study literature on history

Instruction manual

one

You need to learn the internal logic of the Korean language and its difference from the Indo-European languages. According to one version, King Sejong believed that it was necessary to give the subjects a correct idea of ​​reading Chinese characters. But at the same time, scientists took into account not only the experience of Mongolian and Uigur writing, but also developed their original phonological system. Therefore, the Korean language formula is literary Chinese, plus the logic of neighboring languages, plus its own innovations. For example, Korean phonetics involves dividing a syllable not into two parts, but into three: beginning, middle and end. Ancient scholars associated this phonetic division with the elements, and this, of course, is close to Chinese philosophy.

2

After the basis is mastered, you need to understand the relationship between Korean and Chinese. In parallel with Hangul, the original Korean alphabet, Koreans actively used Chinese writing until the beginning of the 20th century. There were many Chinese words in the letter, so a system of mixed hieroglyphic-letter writing arose. Chinese characters are for borrowed terms, and Korean letters are for verb endings, immutable particles, and native Korean words. The same confusion is in vocabulary: it is a dual system of native Korean and Sino-Korean words. For example, in modern Korean, there are two “sets” of numerals. Sometimes they are interchangeable, and sometimes mutually exclusive of each other, and these subtleties must be known.

3

Perhaps the most difficult to master the spelling and literary norms of the written Korean language. They were approved not so long ago: in 1933 by the Korean Language Society. And if the spelling of the 15th century was based on the principle of one letter - one phoneme, now one morpheme (the smallest significant unit of language) can sound differently, but spelled the same way. For example, the Korean word “caps” (“price”) may sound like “cap” or “com”. In most cases, a magazine article or blog on is a mix of Chinese and Korean writing, with a ratio of 50 to 50.

Korean textbooks and tutorials