South 고등학교 2학년 Language Life and Hanja

1. Hanja vocabulary in language life

Sound and meaning of hanja · Standard pronunciation of hanja words · Meaning and etymology · Idioms and their origins · Word relations · New words for social change · Academic vocabulary · Refined word choice · Words in context · Comparing hanja vocabulary across East Asia

• East Asian Culture: What China, Korea and Japan Share – China, Korea and Japan speak different languages, but for about two thousand years they shared a writing system based on Chinese characters (hanzi in China, hanja in Korea, kanji in Japan), and many ideas: Confucian values of family and study, Buddhism that came from India, paper and printing, and the lunar calendar. Each place changed what it borrowed: Korea created its own alphabet (hangul, 1443) and Japan made kana from characters. Scholars wrote in classical Chinese, so books travelled far, and records such as the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty and the Tripitaka Koreana keep this heritage alive today. Many words are built from the same characters, so they sound alike in all three languages (for example telephone: diànhuà, jeonhwa, denwa). But some words are false friends: same characters, different meaning. Learning both the shared part and the local part is the key to understanding the region.