Thursday, December 11, 2008

Korean alphabet

Maybe you noticed in the title of the previous post that the characters look a bit different than Japanese characters. (Can you see?)

Koreans have their own alphabet hangul, and (how cool!) it was developed by one person, King Sejong the Great, in the 15th century. If I understood correctly, their "letters" are actually parts of "characters", so they join letters together to form one character, one sound. And then they put characters next to each other to form a word.


According to a Korean friend, the system is almost ingenious, much better than Japanese kanji, katakana or hiragana. Not sure if he thinks like this only because he is Korean! :)

What I can't get out of my head is that a Koran person living and studying in Japan (which is not that rare) knows hangul, katakana and hiragana alphabets, plus let's say 3000 kanji characters.

And what I know is only the latin alphabet plus 3 additional slovenian letters!

2 comments:

milton said...

Verjetno prepoznaš tudi kakšen kanji znak. Preverili smo, da za jogurt že veš, kako se napše.

Anonymous said...

I must remind you that the genetic code has only 4 letters;)