Welcome to a “han guk mal” learning blog!

Chinese characters are INTERESTING to Koreans because the Korean language does NOT have to include them. By the way, many Korean words have matching Chinese characters, syllable by syllable. This happens in the Japanese language too.

You don’t have to learn, because they are not needed to be in the written system. However, it is very convenient to learn the meanings of many Korean words if you know the Chinese characters behind them.

I used the term “Chinese characters” because that would be more familiar to English speakers. But there is a Korean word for this “han ja” and that exact Chinese characters for “han ja” in Korean are used in the Japanese “kan ji”

And “han” means “China” as a Chinese character in Korean (in that word). Isn’t it INTERESTING? More specifically, “han” is a name of the dynasty where Chinese characters started to shape to be written on paper, because paper itself was first invented in that era.

The word “han ja” would be the first Korean word we learn today. 한자 (which means “Chinese characters”)

And then “han ja o” would be the second. 한자어 (this means sino-korean words: Korean words that composed with Chinese characters)

This is the course where you can learn “han ja o” (or “Hanjaeo”) in Korean. Thank you, see you next time!