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Return to Korean Buddhism, Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - Hanja Index, Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - Chinese Radical Index, Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - Hanzi Index, Chinese Character Cognates in Japanese - Kanji Index, Chinese Character Cognates - 808 Common Hanzi Kanji & Korean Hanja, Learn Korean, 2000 Most Common Korean Words in Context - Get Fluent & Increase Your Korean Vocabulary with 2000 Korean Phrases

ISBN: 978-0-9940911-3-0

• Chinese Character Cognates - 808 Common Hanzi Kanji & Korean Hanja

• Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - Hanja Index
• Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - Chinese Radical Index
• Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - Hanzi Index
• Chinese Character Cognates in Japanese - Kanji Index

• Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - Top 100+
• Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - 102-202
• Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - 203-304
• Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - 304-404
• Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - 405-505
• Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - 506-606
• Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - 607-707
• Chinese Character Cognates in Korean - 708-808

• Studying Korean and Studying Chinese Mandarin (Reviewing with MemRise iPad app for Language Learning
  • The Most Common Chinese Characters in Order of [[Frequency by Zein Patrick Hassel]]
  • 2000 Most Common Korean Words in Context - Get Fluent & Increase Your Korean Vocabulary with 2000 Korean Phrases
  • Chinese Character Cognates - 808 Common Hanzi Kanji & Korean Hanja, 3rd Edition by Joon Geem

Preface

I love my friends and family, and I never had reason to doubt their love for me. But if gifts are tokens of affection, total strangers would surely put them to shame. On my birthday morning of July 8, 2013 I woke up to find a present I never knew I always wanted, by folks I never met. A front page story in a Korean newspaper in Toronto reported that a so-called Group of 30, made up of notables from China Japan and South Korea, had released a common list of 800 frequently used ‘Chinese' characters that shared the same meaning in three of the four East Asian countries. I wished Vietnamese was included, but I was ecstatic and beside myself for the first time in a long time.

As a Korean-English translator and a student of East Asia I always wanted to improve on my characters, but to my chagrin had kept putting it off, not only from the exigencies of life but from a real excuse: the daunting task of ‘how to' sift through what amounted to tens of thousands of characters to then learn, memorize, and eventually make them my own. And knowing from my travels and dabbling in the languages that many were variants of the same character, I really had no choice but to rely on random piecemeal acquisition.

The original list of 800 was modified and finalized to 808 characters on April 22, 2014 during the 9th Session of the Group of 30, which included a pledge in its communique that it'd be made ubiquitous during the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, to say nothing of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. Whether it was 800 or 808, either one was still a manageable number, a doable number, and I promptly set about mastering my new toy. This book is the result of playing around with that list.

A lot of independent parts fell into place to complete this book. In July 2014, the unified CJK typeface Source Han Sans was released as an open source font by Adobe and Google. It was only then did I think that this list I was building would be any good as a book of any kind. Then there was the problem of etymology. With the sparse and esoteric nature of English material on the subject, I am indebted to the Korean books on Chinese characters I learned from and referenced. For the sound bytes, I thank university exchange student Yiela Hsu from Taipei for the Mandarin, Tokyo University graduate student Koshiro Nagai for the Japanese, and finally my big boss registered nurse Haeyoung Song in Seoul for the Korean. And lastly, I would not have been able to dedicate big chunks of unbroken time had I not been waiting most unceremoniously for justice to prevail in a civil and criminal lawsuit lodged in the cogs of the South Korean legal system.

This is a big picture book. By itself, it is unlikely to turn anyone fluent in any of the languages, but it is likely to take those with a footing in an East Asian language beyond the lay. For either beginners or those thinking of picking up any of the languages, it provides a bird's eye view. Knowledge of characters is obviously pivotal to any East Asian language, and this book will help in study. I am already googling hard in Hanzi and Kanji, and I'm itching to put to test the claim that 80 percent of billboards in the countries will be readable and that at least written communication will be possible with the other language users.

I hope businesspeople, students, teachers, and travelers will find this book useful, and that it will empower them in many ways as we all enter further into this East Asian century.

Seoul, March 2015

Joon Geem

Update

A number of changes were made for the 3rd edition of this ebook. Other than the most glaring typos and obvious stylistic changes, these included minor tweaks in the etymology and vocabulary sections under each character. For the most part they remain largely the same across the editions, but the newly added audio recordings complementing this 3rd edition follows the vocabulary list finalized for this one, which is being released in March 2017. And I would like to take the opportunity here to thank those for recording the audio bytes: foreign student He Chunxiao from the Sichuan College of Media and Communications for the Mandarin, foreign residents Eiren Yokoyama and Kaori Arai as well as Registered Nurse Yoko Matsumoto for the Japanese, and as always, my one and only, Haeyoung Song for the Korean.

Introduction

This book has two main parts to it: a main body and an indices. As for the indices, there is one index for each language with cross references to the other two. The links there lead directly to the character in the main body for quick navigation. The Pinyin in the Hanzi Index is listed in alphabetical order and follows the proper tone order for Mandarin. The Kanji Index follows the Hiragana order of repeating iterations of あいうえお and its corresponding Romaji. The Hanja Index follows the Hangeul order of 가나다라 and an experimental IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription is given as a guide to its pronunciation.

The main body is made up of tables with one table for each of the 808 characters. It is arranged in Unicode order as they appear for Traditional Chinese, starting with U+4E00 and ending with U+9F52. There are eight chapters called Character Sets and an overview of all the characters covered in a chapter is given at the top of each Character Set.

The main table is self-explanatory, but for clarity, the character that follows its number is in Traditional Chinese, while the data in the three language-specific columns contain the corresponding Hanzi, Kanji, and Hanja characters followed by their corresponding pronunciation guides and their readings in their respective scripts, including Pinyin for the simplified Mandarin Chinese, Hiragana and Romaji for Japanese, and Hangeul and the IPA transcription for Korean. Except for the Korean IPA, both the Pinyin and Romaji are equivalent keystrokes for character input on an alphabet-based keyboard. Each character reading and vocabulary list are linked to an online pronunciation guide at cjk808.blogspot.com.

As for the vocabulary, every effort was made to give words that started with the character in question, but with equal priority for diversity and the broadest representation.

For those who might not have heard before, all characters, whether they are Hanzi, Kanji or Hanja, can be grouped into one of six categories. Some can belong to more than one, and some are contested as to which one, but it is widely agreed that being mindful of classification helps in character appreciation and therefore retention. Also, even though there are only six categories, they can come in many different names, because they are translations. In this book I refer to them in the etymology section as pictograms, simple ideograms, (simple) compound ideograms, phono-semantic compounds, transformed cognates that is also called derived meanings, and rebus that is also called arbitrary meanings. Their definitions have been withheld in the same spirit as a little book on recursion that left the defining of terms up to the readers themselves. I believe that's for the best here too.

Chinese characters as they are known and used today are only the latest version. In other words, they have changed over time and will likely change again in the future. The oldest known are markings on pottery (5000-1500 BC), then oracle bone inscriptions (1500-1000 BC), then Bronze Writings (1500-700 BC), then the Greater Seal (1000-200 BC), then the Lesser Seal (200 BC-present), the Abbreviated or Clerkly Script (200 BC-present), and the Regular Script (200 CE-present).

Hiragana ・ Katakana

あ ・ ア い ・ イ う ・ ウ え ・ エ お ・ オ

a i u e o

K か ・ カ き ・ キ く ・ ク け ・ ケ ど ・ コ

S さ ・ サ し ・ シ す ・ ス せ ・ セ そ ・ ソ

T た ・ タ ち ・ チ つ ・ ツ て ・ テ と ・ ト

N な ・ ナ に ・ ニ ぬ ・ ヌ ね ・ ネ の ・ ノ

H は ・ ハ ひ ・ ヒ ふ ・ フ へ ・ へ ほ ・ ホ

M ま ・ マ み ・ ミ む ・ ム め ・ メ も ・ モ

Y や ・ ヤ

ゆ ・ ユ

よ ・ ヨ

R ら ・ ラ り ・ リ る ・ ル れ ・ レ ろ ・ ロ

W わ ・ ワ

を ・ ヲ

~n ん ・ ン

• The pronunciation for the Hiragana 'ち' and Katakana 'チ' approximates closer to 'chi' than 'ti' while 'つ' and 'ツ' are closer to 'tsu' than 'tu'. Both 'ふ' and 'フ' are also closer to 'fu' than 'hu'. The ~n for 'ん' and 'ン' notes that they more often than not appear at the end of a word.

IPA Hangeul Vowels

ㅏ /ʌ/ (up) ㅏ /ə:/ (teacher) ㅗ /ɔ:/ (door) ㅜ /u/ (shoot) ㅡ /ʊ/ (good)

ㅣ /ɪ/ (ship) ㅔㅐ/e/ (bed) ㅗ /ɒ/ (on)

IPA Hangeul Consonants

ㄱ /ɡ/ (go) ㄴ /n/ (now) ㄷ /d/ (dog) ㄹ /r, l/ (red) ㅁ /m/ (man)

ㅂ /b/ (boat) ㅅ /s/ (see) ㅇ /ŋ/ (sing) ㅈ /dʒ/ (June) ㅊ /tʃ/ (cheese)

ㅋ /k/ (car) ㅌ /t/ (tea) ㅍ /p/ (pea) ㅎ /h/ (hat) ㅆ /ʃ/ (shall)

• The abridged IPA chart above shows only those symbols that were used in transcribing Hangeul to IPA. For the sake of simplicity, the ‘ɪ' was used in place of ‘y' in jamos (字母) that begin with the sound. Also, the ‘ɒ' was used when it appears as the first vowel sound in a 'word', such as in '과' (ɡɒʌ). Finally, ‘ʃ' appears only once as an approximation for ‘씨 (氏: ʃɪ)'.

And with that, I invite you to turn the page. Another way of looking at the world awaits you.