Learning hanja...

Since arriving in Korea, I started passively learning some hanja, or Chinese characters used in everyday Korean life. Knowing hanja is in no way necessary to learn basic Korean, but if you know some characters, or even of their existence, even if you don't know what they are, it makes the Korean language make more sense. This is because so many words come from Chinese roots. The pronunciation is often related to the Chinese word. Some of these characters I only know the Chinese word for, I realized now as I am writing this post. But, it doesn't matter, since characters carry meaning, not sound, you can still understand without being able to pronounce it.

I realized a few months ago that I knew quite a few hanja (like almost 10) and I had done that with very little effort on my part. So, then I decided that I would work a little bit harder to learn a few more common ones. My life plan involves learning many languages, Chinese and Japanese being among the top of the list, so I might as well start learning early how to read them, it might help me in the long run.

Here are some of the basic ones I learned without much effort, between just being in Seoul, and going to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Beijing:

- (il) day, sun
門- gate, door
- (mi, mei in chinese) beautiful, also the character for America... long explaination for that one, deserves another post.
- (wol) month, moon
- (jung) medium size, center, middle
- (Buk, bei in chinese) north
西- (seo) east
- (saram, in) person
- (gyeong) capital
- (il) one
- (ee) two
- (sam) three
- (ship) ten
口- (ip) mouth
女 - (yo) woman
大- (dae) big, great
小 - small
水 - (su) water
心 - heart


Then when I started to put more effort in, I learned a few more:
山 - (san) mountain
入- enter
王- (wang) king
出- exit
火- fire


Then you can start combining characters like 火 (fire) 山 (mountain) to make 火山 (volcano), or you can start reading the names of cities, like -Beijing, sun and moon blend together to make 明(myeong- bright) as in myeongdong. I highly recommend learning some hanja while you're here. If you enjoy languaves, it will really help your understanding of the Korean language.