2. 한글 그리고 한자 (Hanguel and Chinese character)

Oi meu amor hahaha

Today, I am going to explain about the history of Hanguel connecting Chinese characters.

A loooooooooog time ago, Korea was affected by China in a lot of areas
because China was so big and powerful that they ruled almost all over the Asian continent where Korea was involved.

At that time, Korea didn't have a written language system and
China had their own written language system so Koreans started borrowing Chinese characters to write words.

Chinese characters.. haha feeling dizzy? kkk

So! Koreans had used Chinese characters to write various things such as academic papers, documents, etc in their living life.
But, the problem was that ordinary people including poor people could not use Chinese characters because as you already know, Chinese characters were too many and hard to learn and it took a very long time and required much money to master. So, poor people could not afford to learn it. And this caused a lot of big problems when they needed to write something and sometimes they even were rooked easily in document needed matters.

And There was a great king called "King Sejong the Great". He was aware of the problem of ordinary people's high illiteracy rate. So, he recruited great linguists to create an easy written language system, Hanguel, only for Korean people. It was in 9th, October, 1446 and the manual was called  "훈민정음, Hunminjeongeum", the first Korean written language manual book.

You can see him in 10,000 won bill :D!

훈민정음, the first Korean letters.

 However, Korea had been affecting by China for too much time, which means Korea had been using many Chinese letters to call and name things by borrowing Chinese characters' meanings already.

You know, Chinese characters are ideogram. So, one character has one meaning and this meaning is combined with other characters and then make another meaning.

This way, Korean people had made a lot of words.

And in this point, Hangul was made just to write the words in an easier way, and it is phonogram. When you hear something, you can write it down in Hanguel very quickly without knowing the meaning. 

So, we have a lot of words based on Chinese character meanings but the pronunciation is based on pure Korean spoken language.

For example, most Koreans have Chinese character names. 

My name, 지혜(Hanguel, my name)=智惠(Chinese character).

Its pronunciation is "Ji-Hye" based on Korean spoken language but the meaning is "Wisdom" based on Chinese characters. 

And many words such as 학생(student)=學生(Chinese character).

학생's pronunciation is based on Korean spoken language as well so it is "Hak-sang" but the meaning, student,  is based on Chinese characters.   

Few years ago, Korea was still writing some political and legal words in Chinese characters so it was easy to find Chinese characters in newspapers

but these days, the government made a movement to use only Hanguel in all living life.

So, now, only some experts who are engaged in the area which requires documents written in Chinese characters use it. 

I explained about this just to make you understand Korean better. :D

Boring? kkkk Be patient! You can talk to me in Korean very fluently soon :).