Learning Journal #6: History of Korean

[Sihan Wang]

From the early centuries of the Common Era, Korean use Chinese script as their language. However, Sejong the Great believes that a country can’t survive for a long time without its own language. He proposed to create a new language for this country. In the 15^th century, featural hangul script was introduced to the whole country in the middle Korean period. Some scholars believe that even though the written Korean is originated from China, the oral Korean belongs to the Altaic linguistic family. Actually, Korean and Chinese differ largely in terms of their grammar. For Chinese, people usually use subject+ verb + object while Korean use Subject + object+ verb. Chinese are analytic language. Words are independent from other words. If we change the sequence of different phrases, the whole sentence will make a different sense. However, for Korean, it’s totally different. We have to add some extra words, usually in the end of a sentence or at the beginning in order to make sense.

[Sihan Wang]

The most useful point is that for me, I could utilize my Chinese to learn Korean. Since many Korean words were imported from Chinese, I could memorize those vocabularies easily. Also, by understanding the difference between Chinese and Korean Grammar, I know how to construct a sentence in the right way with given vocabularies.

[Global Studio]

How will knowing these facts help you learn Korean?