This past week, I was finally able to talk with my language partner Jimin and fellow learning partner Tommy via Zoom. After catching up with each other, Jimin shared a document focusing on 고유어 (Native Korean), 한자어 (Hanja, Sino-Korean), and 외래어 (loanwords). This was an interesting topic that I enjoyed because I was able to properly see how 한자 is used, and that 고유어 and 외래어 are the terms to refer to native Korean and loanwords. While I knew they existed and frequently used words under each category, this lesson provided a time for me to connect the dots.
한자어 makes up around 70% of the daily Hangul people use. A majority of idiomatic expressions, advanced vocabulary, and professional jargon are words formed by Hanja. An example of a four-character idiomatic expression is 고진감래(苦盡甘來) meaning a mix of "no pain, no gain", "April showers bring May flowers", and "the bee sucks honey out of the bitterest flowers". Loanwords, 외래어, are also highly conventional in daily Korean. An example of a medical jargon, which also happens to be a loanword is “인슐레이션” (insulation). A more colloquial loanword is 콘텐츠 meaning “contents”. Interestingly, loanwords are not always written in Korean to completely reflect the pronunciation. The word “contents” should be written as 컨텐즈 to read it the way it is pronounced in English. However, the spelling of this loanword is 콘텐츠. 고유어, on the other hand, is the “proper” Korean language––expressions and words that always existed only in Korean. Examples range from 어머니 (mother) and 하늘 (sky) to 꽃 (flower) and 구름 (clouds). 고유어 also tends to be used alone as its own word without the addition of derivational morphemes. An interesting characteristic of 한자어 is that alike to the usage of knowing Latin root words, 한자 (Hanja) can be used to decipher a word in Korean that is unfamiliar. For example, knowing the Chinese characters/Hanja for 人 (사람 ‘인’ = mankind) and 力(힘 '력' = power), one can come to the conclusion that “인력” (人力) means manpower.
Learning about the three categories of the Korean language was enlighting of how historical ties and events, as well as modern-day events, affect the way a language develops and changes. This lesson was all the more interesting due to my limited recollection of learning Hanja coupled with taking Mandarin Chinese in school. I was happy to notice how I could connect my understanding of basic Chinese as well as 한자어 characters I’ve seen before (menus at Chinese restaurants in Korea, for example, use “대/중/소” (= 大／中／下 = large/medium/small for dish sizes) to come to answers to the questions provided by Jimin. I was also happy to see how easily I could understand an excerpt from a news article about COVID-19. I hope to continue studying Hanja characters to aid me in future cracking of unfamiliar terminology and jargon. I also want to uncover how much 고유어, 한자어, and 외래어 I personally use when speaking in Korean. I have a feeling that 외래어 will take up a large proportion of my Korean.
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