Re: Chinese writing systems

Yoon Ha writes:

>Florian Rivoal wrote:
>
>>Yes, they mainly use hangul. but also use quite a lot of hanzi, (called
>>hanja, if i ma corect).
>>
>You're correct (that's a tensified or fortis [tS], if it matters).  The
>two linguistics books I have on Korean as well as my mom note that the
>amount of hanj'a being used regularly is steadily going down, e.g. in
>newspapers.  If you're doing scholarly stuff, especially history, I
>imagine that doesn't help.  ^_^
I read in an article in one of the Taiwanese equivalents to "Time" a
while back that proficiency in even the basic characters needed is on
the wane. One of the examples cited was that characters were still
required for names on legal documents like driver's licenses. Trouble
was, if a policeman pulled you over for something, chances were he
had no way of reading it. I thought Korean only used a couple of
hundred hanj'a in common use (strictly limited to newspaper headlines
and the like), but enthusiasm is diminishing radically to learning
even those.

Kou