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Comment by zaik | Hacker News Reader

Do you have to learn kanji for Korean? If I remember correctly, Hangul is pretty straightforward and does not require you to memorize hundreds of characters.

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You don’t _need_ it but I think it’s nice to know kanji (or hanja as we say in Korean) to understand deeper cultural meanings in the language.

To give an example, I’ve just watched episode 12 of “Strange attorney Woo”, and one of the character talks about the two different hanja that make up 사 in 변호사 and 검사. A lot of the older generations still use this kind of comparison to make a point about nuance/history of a word.

But if you talk to younger generations, they talk predominantly in internet slangs and have no clues about hanja.

That would be 病護士 and 檢査 I guess

검사 is 檢事. 検査 has the same pronunciation but means “to inspect”.

Not sure if you can read Korean but here is the link that talks about differences between the two hanjas: https://m.ch.yes24.com/article/view/33205

I'm pretty sure Korean doesn't use kanji at all, no.

While it's true modern-day South Koreans don't use Chinese characters (hanja [1]) at all in their day-to-day life, there are still a few places where they show up, as it was the most common writing system in Korean up to the late 19th century. Most notably, most Korean names can be written in hanja and almost all Koreans know how to write their own name that way at least. South Korean kids also study hanja at high school to some extent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja

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