From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hanja
is the
Korean
word for
Chinese characters
. It is about the Chinese characters that are
borrowed
from the
Chinese language
and used in the
Korean language
with Korean
pronunciation
.
Hanja-mal
or
hanja-eo
is about words which can be written with hanja.
Hanmun
(漢文) is about the Chinese Classical writing, but
hanja
can sometimes be used to generally mean
hanmun
too. Hanja was never very changed, so almost all of the Chinese characters in hanja are the same as in traditional Chinese. Only a few hanja characters are unique to Korea.
In the 1440s, however, a Korean
hangul
alphabet relying on
sound
was made by a group of students, led by
King Sejong the Great
. It was not widely used at first. However, by the early 19th and 20th century it was more widely used than
hanja
, and it is now the official writing system of Korea.
[1]
But until then, everyone mostly read and wrote in
hanja
, so most of the older books in Korean literature are written in hanja. Students who learn Korean history learn hanja to read historical papers. Children in South Korea still learn hanja, for many South Korean words still have roots in hanja. In
North Korea
, however, hanja has been abolished along with many Chinese loanwords, and North Koreans only use hangul to write in Korean.