kangmi: learning korean

正: justice; righteousness

日: day; sun

My first creepy feeling while reading 한자.

I have to admit that I get some pleasure out of learning 한자. Chinese characters have a mysterious air lacking in the alphabet used by English (and sometimes with variations, other languages). Having said that, it hasn’t taken me long to appreciate both that alphabet and 한글. 한글 may be overhyped, but it’s easy to learn and to use, and I’m already more charitable about the hype. There’s no doubt that the Chinese could do better for themselves.

At the end of this year, I should have learned approximately 313 한자 (at a rate of six a week). At that rate, it will take me nearly six years to learn them all. That’s all right with me. Given regular study, my spoken Korean should be significantly better in six years, and I’ll still know a lot of 한자.

Although I’m not logically selective, I don’t add every new 한자 I encounter. There has to be some small thing about it that catches my eye. It could be the context, it could be related to a 한자 I’ve already learned, it could be on a signboard, and I just want to know what it says.

Now that I’m building up a small repertoire, I’m starting to use the 오늘의 고사성어 feature at Naver’s 한자 사전. The one criteria I use for selection is that the phrase must include a 한자 I already know. I find a couple of them a week (two phrases are enough for my pace), do some research, and take them to my Thursday evening lesson with 인선. Neither my 한자 nor my Korean is good enough to fully understand the explanations provided. I read them anyway, and 인선 fills in the blanks.

e-hanja is another site that provides phrases of the day, and as soon as I get signed up (don’t know if I need the dreaded registration number or not), I plan to start subscribing to it.

Next: Why I Study 한자