New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sat Mar 25, 2023 6:47 pm

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Resources:


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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby leosmith » Sat Mar 25, 2023 9:48 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Resources:
Here he says "The most important thing I've learned in my own studies of Korean was...classical Chinese characters - in order to understand vocabulary; you can't learn it without it". This is 100% false, and it amazes me that he is still sticking to his guns over something that hasn't been true for perhaps 20 years now.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby lichtrausch » Sat Mar 25, 2023 10:08 pm

leosmith wrote:Here he says "The most important thing I've learned in my own studies of Korean was...classical Chinese characters - in order to understand vocabulary; you can't learn it without it". This is 100% false, and it amazes me that he is still sticking to his guns over something that hasn't been true for perhaps 20 years now.

Agreed. Although I do think a weaker version of this claim is true, namely that knowing the characters facilitates vocabulary acquisition considerably.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby leosmith » Sat Mar 25, 2023 10:22 pm

lichtrausch wrote:knowing the characters facilitates vocabulary acquisition considerably.
The analogy that I hear often is that it's like knowing Latin and Greek roots for English learners. It facilitates, but acquiring them takes time, so I'm not sure it's worth it to a learner to learn these rather than spend that time elsewhere. That being said, I had a background in Chinese characters when I started Korean, and I think that knowledge helped me a little bit.

I personally wouldn't advise people with no background in Chinese characters to learn them for the purpose of learning Korean, which is what I believe the professor is doing.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby rdearman » Sat Mar 25, 2023 10:26 pm

The only thing my mandarin studies helped me with in Korean has been Korean -sino numbers.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby Picaboo » Sat Mar 25, 2023 11:20 pm

I bought https://play.google.com/store/books/aut ... iho%20Choo thinking breaking down words into components might help me. Turned out, not so much. I'd rather waste a few bucks trying that than a year learning Chinese characters and finding out the same thing. :)
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby Sizen » Sun Mar 26, 2023 6:24 am

leosmith wrote:The analogy that I hear often is that it's like knowing Latin and Greek roots for English learners.

My experience as someone with knowledge of at least one reading of ~2500 Japanese characters and just under 1000 Mandarin characters under his belt going to Korean has been less like what you’re describing and more like knowing French and then going to Spanish (or perhaps Romanian would be a more apt example, but I haven’t studied Romanian). The words definitely aren’t quite the same, but the similarities are striking, especially once you start to notice the patterns. I can often guess a word’s meaning, or at least the characters, before I’m told what the word is. And if I can’t do that, looking up the characters of the word usually gives me a little eureka moment that helps it stick.

Would I recommend learning Hanja if you’re just starting out and don’t have any background knowledge? No way, unless you’re interested and then have at it! From what I can gather, it does sound like you will at some point need a few dozen to maybe even a couple hundred characters to get by in Korea and truly understand everything around you though, as many characters do find there way into news headlines, subtitles on variety TV shows, store signs, etc. And even Koreans know quite a few characters even when they claim otherwise. But this is only for a complete understanding on par with natives.

I think this is an interesting video on the subject https://youtu.be/1H5QTZIC-QI, especially the interviews that start at around the 4 minute mark.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby zjfict » Sun Mar 26, 2023 1:21 pm

leosmith wrote:
jeff_lindqvist wrote:Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Resources:
Here he says "The most important thing I've learned in my own studies of Korean was...classical Chinese characters - in order to understand vocabulary; you can't learn it without it". This is 100% false, and it amazes me that he is still sticking to his guns over something that hasn't been true for perhaps 20 years now.


He has always pursued languages with such a literary/historical/humanities aim. I wonder if that is what he has in mind.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby leosmith » Sun Mar 26, 2023 5:36 pm

zjfict wrote:He has always pursued languages with such a literary/historical/humanities aim. I wonder if that is what he has in mind.
This is possible. Maybe he really meant "you can't learn it to the degree I learn it without it".
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby leosmith » Sun Mar 26, 2023 6:16 pm

Sizen wrote:My experience as someone with knowledge of at least one reading of ~2500 Japanese characters and just under 1000 Mandarin characters under his belt going to Korean has been less like what you’re describing and more like knowing French and then going to Spanish
I knew about the same number of Kanji as you, but maybe four or five times as many Hanzi, and time-wise it wasn’t anything like learning French from a base of Spanish (I guess I went the opposite direction you did). Maybe you didn’t mean time-wise; maybe you meant something like similar grammar (mostly Japanese), similar vocabulary (like 大学 = だいがく/dàxué/대학교), etc. But imo the critical metric for language difficulty is time. It took me about three to four times as long to reach an upper intermediate in Korean (given my Japanese and Mandarin base) as it did in French (given my Spanish base).
Sizen wrote:From what I can gather, it does sound like you will at some point need a few dozen to maybe even a couple hundred characters to get by in Korea
As I mentioned earlier, it helps a little bit, obv more so in Korea than learning in a vacuum, but you definitely don’t “need it to get by”. And learning 100-200, like the guy suggests in the linked video, is quite a bit more reasonable than what the professor used to recommend (I think he said one or two thousand...can’t find the post).
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