Actually those are not supposed to be pronounced like you describe. The way it sounds is the official pronunciation.

Maybe it said you had to learn a few. Too lazy to go up and check. But in any case, you do have to learn quite a few.

It’s tempting to conclude that the Korean language doesn’t use or require many Hanja after going to a Korean website and seeing that its not in prevalent use–even more so for people that aren’t fluent in Korean. But ultimately, this is not true. Asking a native Korean speaker (preferably from Korea, not some 2nd generation Kor-Am who knows how to get around and thinks he’s fluent) would be the easiest.

But even something like KIA can mean either KIA cars or “hunger” as an aggregate of chinese characters. Or maybe a korean pronunciation of “Gear.” Arguably, the context in which this is written will determine the meaning, but nonetheless, the meaning stems from chinese characters. this is a simple example, there are many more where even in context it is ambiguous.

Take Korean names for example: someone by the name of “Lee Jae Hong.” Its impossible to decipher what “Jae” and what “Hong” this person’s name uses. There are many ‘types’ of Jae’s and Hong’s because korean is an atonal language. These are referred to has Hoon and Eum. But anyways. Hopefully that helps.

Just my 2 cents.

Language is a tool for communication. And Chinese characters 漢字 allow a Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and maybe Vietnamese person to understand or decipher written text even if they never learn the spoken form.

Although you touched on the homonym problem of Japanese with your example of せい, the Korean language has the exact same problem, if not a bigger problem because the ultra-nationalists and lazy Koreans are hanja-phobic: Japanese disambiguate with Kanji; Koreans can disambiguate with Hanja, but rarely do.

I would say Korean is harder because Hanja is not prevalent anymore, thanks to hanja-phobic Koreans. Various studies have shown that Chinese characters speed up reading. If the Hanja-Hangul mixed form makes a come-back, Korean would be much more enjoyable to learn.

Koreans nowaday are becoming culturally inferior and not fully getting the most out of their own culture, because of their lack of Hanja.

From personal experience, I have been exposed to Japanese since I was a child and grew up listening to it in movies (Even American ones like Last Samurai, Letters from Iwojima, etc..) and anime. But how many American films feature the Korean language? I can only think of a tv show, and that’s ‘lost’ (badass, by the way!)
Because of this, memorizing a japanese word when I hear it is much much much easier to do than memorizing a Korean word.

Well,I mean, now is ok because I’ve been studying Korean for a year and a half and never really dabbled too much in Japanese, so Korean is much easier for me to hear, but still! I think this lifelong exposure is definitely worth considering when analyzing a language’s perceived easiness.
Please give me some feedback~

-Brad

I think Japanese language is easy to get the infomation from the book.
there are meny gairaigo.
for example 電脳 in chinese.
it is easy to change it the katakana.
so i think it is difficult to study ultra-fine field in chinese and korean.
hangul does not have a concept like kanji.
they must read the sound because of phonetic symbol

that is why i think there is a Japan’s success for modernization.

It is easy for Japanese language to get the chinese and western concept.