Sample
from Chapter 14. Learning Han'gul and Hancha
Teaching Han'gul as an Alphabet or a Syllabary
Han'gul, being an alphabetic syllabary, can be taught as an alphabet
or as a syllabary. Let us survey how it has been taught throughout its 500-year
history.
In the 16th century, some years after its creation, Han'gul was seldom
taught directly but was indirectly acquired while learning Hancha, as it
was used to give the sounds and meanings of Hancha. In the 19th century,
women, children, and laborers picked up Han'gul, or acquired it without
much teaching, from a Han'gul syllable chart (table 13-4) that might be
hung on a wall. ...
Right
after the end of World War II and of the Japanese rule, when Han'gul began
to be taught once more in schools, it was taught more as an alphabet than
as a syllabary, no doubt emulating the teaching of the Roman alphabet in
the West: Children learned individual alphabet letters and their phonemes,
and then learned to package them into syllable blocks. The alphabetic method
does not appeal to young children, as it deals with small meaningless sound
units, phonemes. It also requires some ability to analyze and synthesize
sounds, which young children find difficult. In 1948 the teaching unit jumped
from phonemeletters to sentences, bypassing syllables, syllable blocks,
and words. Both methods produced a few primary school graduates who failed
to master Han'gul (Ch'oe 1986). In the 1960s the noted educator Yi Ung-baek
(1988) advocated the use of syllables and syllable blocks as teaching units.
He proposed displaying the Han'gul syllable chart prominently at the beginning
of a textbook, in front of a classroom, and over a desk at home.
Lately the syllable block has been the primary teaching unit, which has
many advantages over an alphabetic letter. A Korean syllable is far more
likely to be meaningful than is a phoneme, in that a syllable often by itself
represents a morpheme or a word. ...
...
studies, besides showing that syllables are easier to manipulate than phonemes,
show that people can proficiently manipulate phonemes usually after, but
not before, they become literate in an alphabet. (Some educators in the
West believe that phoneme awareness is a prerequisite to learning to read
in an alphabet.) Further, they tend not to become aware of phonemes, if
they become literate in logographs or syllabaries. Finally, because a syllable
is easier to isolate as a unit than a phoneme, in the development of writing
systems a syllabary begat an alphabet, not the other way around (chap. 1).
The beauty and ingenuity of Han'gul is that people do not have to learn
2,000 unrelated graphs for 2,000 syllables; they merely have to learn the
24 letters and the systematic way they package into syllable blocks. They
learn easily through deduction, instruction, and practice all the syllable
blocks in the basic chart. Once people learn these systematically constructed
syllable blocks, they should have little trouble pronouncing any syllable
string, whether familiar, unfamiliar, or nonsense. There is no need to consult
a dictionary for either pronouncing or spelling.
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