Feature request for Korean

Just looking at Cantonese now. As a Mandarin speaking due to the shared characters it’s very approachable.

Korean used to be written with characters! Would there be anyway to have a switch were one could convert the text into characters? Would make the language very fun to learn for Chinese speakers.

Koreans would probably be offended to be asked to change Hangul (created by King Sejong and his scholars in 1440s) back to Chinese. He created Korean to promote literacy among all classes not just the nobles who wrote in Chinese characters.

There are dictionaries for Hanja that you might be interested in. Although, 60% of Korean is derived from Chinese, they use Hangul to write out the words.

I was thinking about something similar,however in my opinion the best idea would be putting smaller characters above hangul (something similar to furigana in japanese, but it would work the other way around)

I would really like this to be a feature. But I don’t think it is possible without some kind of machine learning or other wizardry in the back end. Reason being that you can’t map the korean syllable block to a hanja without the context of the sentence. Happy to be proven wrong though. The other way around might be easier to implement.

You can see the problem by looking at these two example search results:
https://en.dict.naver.com/#/search?query=고
https://en.dict.naver.com/#/search?query=苦*

I’d love this, but as wnint points out, it would probably have to be done from Hanja into Hangul. With Hangul it’s taking 1 word that sounds and looks exactly like several other words and just asking you to give the right one. You can’t know what word it is. Is there any other language that has this much of an issue with word ambiguity out of context? It’s quite unique from what I’ve seen.

I have asked myself that question many times :*( It appears to be an issue even for some writers as hanjas are quite frequently used in some forms of literature (such as 나의 한국현대사 that I’m reading now).
I sometimes wish there was a mixed script instead. I think snowball effect for picking up words would get more powerful. What do you think?

I think it would help, but at the same time, most native speakers don’t use them much anymore. 3 of my Korean language exchange partners and 1 tutor have all told me that they don’t know Hanja very well. I don’t think they’re trying to be overly modest either. These people are all around 30-33 years old. I think that the younger Koreans know even fewer Hanja as it seems to be getting slowly pushed out of Korean education by English. After all, there is only so much time in the day, and all of the English study has to have effects on other subjects. I talked a bit about this with one of my exchange friends. I’m curious about what will happen with the characters even in the next 10-20 years or so. I wonder if there will be a need to replace Hanja with something, or if there will be a resurgence of learning the characters. I think that currently students cover about 1800 characters by the end of high school, but that’s a very small number of characters. Additionally, I don’t know if many students are converting those base 1800 into their long-term memories with how much cramming happens in schools these days. It kind of seems similar to most language classes… you learn enough in the short term to pass your test and then you move on.

This is pretty much my experience as well… Like you say, it will be interesting to see what happens in the future. I at least will learn them down to level 3 eventually. Mostly because they are fun.