My Take on Chinese Characters.

I’ve wasted a about 3 hours of my life writing a long post earlier today, only to have the post freeze up on me and constantly revert back to an earlier draft of itself rather than save the changes I made to it. I would try it again in the morning once the WordPress software (hopefully) rights itself, but as it was mostly a rant on me switching to Bloglines because Technorati’s authority system completely sucks, a rather obtuse topic that only a few fellow bloggers would understand, then probably it’s for the best!

In the meantime, I’ve gotten completely addicted to the comic strip SinFest since I saw this strip here on the blog Spunangel last week. There are 7 years worth of strips starting in January 2000 by clicking here. As I type this I’m up to the June 23rd 2001 strip here, which means I’ve read 545 of them in the past couple of days. And speaking of moments, the blog just had it’s 30,000th hit. How cool it that? (Actually it’s been stubbornly stuck at 29,998 for the last 15 minutes…a watched pot never boils and all that…but I’ll have my little thrill soon I’m sure)

These Sinfest strips on Chinese characters, or hanja/한자 at they’re called here in Korea, don’t do the series justice at all, but would be very funny to anyone learning an East Asian language. One advantage to learning Korean over Chinese or Japanese, for instance, is that learning to read and write the 40 or so letters in Korean takes, hell, a good 5 hours or so spread over a week, in contrast to the 5 years or so that it would take for either of those two, and once you’ve got Korean under your belt then you already know 70% of Chinese vocabulary before you start and virtually 100% of Japanese grammar; it’s an excellent base for studying other East Asian languages, which I’ve heard that Vietnamese may be too because it is Romanized.

Damn, it’s still at 29,998! Anyway, as you can read in the last couple of posts, I learn hanja to learn Korean vocab, just like a Korean should learn Latin and Greek roots to learn English vocabulary (although in my experience, most seem to prefer brute force rote-learning). And I’ve started putting some of the hanja characters up on the blog themselves (29,999!) not at all to give my blog an orientalist veneer (although they do look all spiffy and zen-like come to think of it, yes?), but for people who might already know them and/or want to know them. Which includes me, for I’ll definitely start learning Japanese once I’ve gotten Korean under my belt, but suspect that with my Korean pronunciation already being so bad, I’ll never manage with the 5 tones or whatever of Chinese (jeez, still 29,999 hits 15 mins later – is this a conspiracy or something?).

So, I will have to learn hanja to learn Japanese, and have actually tried starting many times. But in Korea only tourist signs really have it, and if I have one hour spare I’d much rather spend it on Korean rather than learning to read and write 10 hanja characters….I don’t need to know how to write “담” (from yesterday) hanja-style to remember it means “converse” or “saying” for instance. And every time I try (older and wiser, it’s been a few years since the last attempt) I’m always struck at how so many books try to make out that hanja characters are anything but highly abstract representations of the real thing, and so make a progression of real object A to character B in 4 panels left to right.  Panel 1 and 2 always look similar and so do 3 and 4, but there’s always a huge gap between 3 and 4 which makes me realise that that whole argument is complete BS. That’s why these SinFest strips are soooo funny: see the cartoonist Tatsuya Ishida’s take on the character for the Korean word “여,” or “woman,” which I mention here for instance:

Here’s the one for man, just as bizarre really:

And here’s some more for fun:

There are patterns and is some logic to the structure of hanja, even I can see that (like I mentioned here), but the ease of the Korean writing system hangul/한글 compared to all that crap gives you a new appreciation, in this sense at least, for having ending up in Korea rather than Japan or China. In case you’re not entirely convinced that you really are luckier to have ended up here rather than there, allow me to present these pictures of Han Yeong/한영, whom you may have see earlier on the blog here:

For anyone still interesed, it jumped from 29,999 to 30,010 a while ago, but I got distracted.