New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

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lichtrausch
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby lichtrausch » Sun Mar 26, 2023 6:40 pm

It seems to me that it only makes sense for a Korean learner to do in-depth hanja study if they want to read advanced non-fiction texts in the language. Medical, legal, historical, etc. To acquire all the rare, relatively opaque vocabulary you need for such an endeavor, you're probably going to want to build up sophisticated semantic maps in which etymology and characters serve as anchors. Similar logic applies for English speakers and Greek/Latin roots.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Mon Mar 27, 2023 6:29 pm

Perhaps I should comment on the videos once in a while. :oops:

Arguelles has an impressive book collection, that's for sure. As for Classical Chinese having a *drum roll* propaedeutic value if one decides to learn Korean or Japanese, it's probably a version of that Latin/Greek reason. (Who knows, perhaps he has experience teaching two groups à la the "Esperanto first, then French" vs. "Four years of French" approach. :? )
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby leosmith » Mon Mar 27, 2023 9:38 pm

lichtrausch wrote:It seems to me that it only makes sense for a Korean learner to do in-depth hanja study if they want to read advanced non-fiction texts in the language.
I'm not sure that it would be more helpful with those words than any other hangul vocabulary. Imo, the biggest advantage comes with classic literature, old documents, signs, menus, etc. where hanja is used instead of hangul.
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lichtrausch
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby lichtrausch » Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:51 pm

leosmith wrote:I'm not sure that it would be more helpful with those words than any other hangul vocabulary. Imo, the biggest advantage comes with classic literature, old documents, signs, menus, etc. where hanja is used instead of hangul.

I guess it ultimately comes down to how systematic you want your knowledge of etymology to be. Sure, you can muddle your way through vocabulary acquisition, sometimes being certain about a morpheme, often being able to make an educated guess about a morpheme, and sometimes having no idea. I would argue this is how vocabulary acquisition goes for most native speakers and most non-native speakers coming at Korean without extensive character knowledge. And that's fine for most purposes. But the larger the quantity of Sino-Korean vocabulary gets that you have to deal with, and the more specialized and obscure the vocabulary gets, the more you will miss not having systematic knowledge of the morphemes involved, which means having extensive character knowledge.

In a world where there were few homophonous Sino-Korean morphemes, I would say forget about the characters. But alas, we live in a world where 구 represents nineteen different Sino-Korean morphemes, counting only the ones that are still in regular use. Can you imagine vocabulary acquisition in English if for example "geo" represented 19 different morphemes, rather than just one with the meaning "earth"?
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby Picaboo » Tue Mar 28, 2023 8:39 pm

leosmith wrote:I'm not sure that it would be more helpful with those words than any other hangul vocabulary. Imo, the biggest advantage comes with classic literature, old documents, signs, menus, etc. where hanja is used instead of hangul.


The logic would be that if you were interested in a field such as politics, you might as well learn all the related hanja first, because you're going to have to learn them sooner or later. And by learning them first, they can help learn additional hangul words that come from the Chinese using the same base.

I still don't think it's worth it. 제 ( 制 ) may mean "govern" but it also means dozens of other things in Korean... but that's the logic. It's a roundabout way to learn a language that uses an alphabet.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby Cainntear » Tue Mar 28, 2023 8:53 pm

leosmith wrote:I'm not sure that it would be more helpful with those words than any other hangul vocabulary. Imo, the biggest advantage comes with classic literature, old documents, signs, menus, etc. where hanja is used instead of hangul.

...which really suggests it boils down to classical intellectual snobbery, which was seeming to go out of fashion, but it might be having something of a revival now.
lichtrausch wrote:I guess it ultimately comes down to how systematic you want your knowledge of etymology to be. Sure, you can muddle your way through vocabulary acquisition, sometimes being certain about a morpheme, often being able to make an educated guess about a morpheme, and sometimes having no idea. I would argue this is how vocabulary acquisition goes for most native speakers and most non-native speakers coming at Korean without extensive character knowledge. And that's fine for most purposes. But...

Ah, the "yes but" strategy: refer to everything positive that someone might bring up, then say "but" and turn it all into negatives.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby leosmith » Wed Mar 29, 2023 5:17 am

Hmm...I wouldn’t say that people who don’t learn hanja, or don’t get systematic about their knowledge of etymology are “muddling” their way through vocabulary acquisition.
lichtrausch wrote:alas, we live in a world where 구 represents nineteen different Sino-Korean morphemes, counting only the ones that are still in regular use. Can you imagine vocabulary acquisition in English if for example "geo" represented 19 different morphemes, rather than just one with the meaning "earth"?
This has little or no impact on acquiring vocabulary unless you are learning it in isolation. I see the same argument used to try to convince people that Mandarin would not function if you dropped the characters and only used pinyin. It's the tired old homophone argument made to terrify non-speakers.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby lichtrausch » Wed Mar 29, 2023 2:23 pm

leosmith wrote:
lichtrausch wrote:alas, we live in a world where 구 represents nineteen different Sino-Korean morphemes, counting only the ones that are still in regular use. Can you imagine vocabulary acquisition in English if for example "geo" represented 19 different morphemes, rather than just one with the meaning "earth"?
This has little or no impact on acquiring vocabulary unless you are learning it in isolation. I see the same argument used to try to convince people that Mandarin would not function if you dropped the characters and only used pinyin. It's the tired old homophone argument made to terrify non-speakers.

Are you saying that etymological knowledge in general has little or no impact on acquiring vocabulary?
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby Picaboo » Wed Mar 29, 2023 2:57 pm

lichtrausch wrote:Are you saying that etymological knowledge in general has little or no impact on acquiring vocabulary?


Etymological knowledge is neither necessary nor sufficient for [url]acquiring[/url]vocabulary. It's on par with mnemonics or anything else that provides hooks, meaning and context to a word. It is somewhat effective to get the word in and out of memory early on, but you really only truly acquire a word by seeing/hearing it in many different contexts, and possibly, using it in many.

So, it has some impact, sure, but how much effort are you willing to put in to make something which is basically a mnemonic, is the question, unless of course you're interested in such things, which would make it worthwhile for its own sake and an even more effective as a mnemonic devise.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby galaxyrocker » Wed Mar 29, 2023 3:37 pm

Picaboo wrote:Etymological knowledge is neither necessary nor sufficient for [url]acquiring[/url]vocabulary. It's on par with mnemonics or anything else that provides hooks, meaning and context to a word. It is somewhat effective to get the word in and out of memory early on, but you really only truly acquire a word by seeing/hearing it in many different contexts, and possibly, using it in many.



Research on this that's not Krashen? I've definitely found etymology to help me in acquiring vocabulary, especially when I already knew a related language and could relate it to cognates or similar etymological things in the other language. I think learning vocabulary through ways you find interesting does more than anything else.
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