Still, four is enough for me.
My teacher is from Taiwan, so that's what I'm learning. I do think it looks a lot better and it's honestly not that much harder to master.
Hmm, I thought it was 1 945 characters.

What I prefer to do is memorize the stroke order through repetition and memorize the sound/meaning by associating the character with an image of what it is. My textbook uses this approach to a great extent.
That's still impressive because I consider those two of the hardest languages there are (understood as languages Anglophones study). I take it you picked up the bulk of it in Korea?

I honestly think they're easier, because they're more logical.


That's what I thought a year ago. But then I learned there's another 983 characters they have to learn. They're used mostly in names, though.


That sounds like a pretty good method.


Actually, I reached intermediate stage in Korean before I even went to Korea. While there, I improved but not as much as I could have because almost everyone I met could speak some English.

I agree. Simplified destroys the correspondences between the radicals that are often crucial to the meaning.

My only issue about traditional is that it's harder to read on computers.
I don't think I'd bother learning those. How often would they be used, realistically?
I think it's the best system for logographic characters. This way I can guess at the meaning of their Japanese kanji even if I don't know the correct readings.
You should have insisted on speaking in Korean!

You wouldn't be able to read a lot of names, though.


Yeah, but at the time I wasn't that motivated to learn it.

Do you plan on living in Japan? If I didn't I'd probably learn them on a need-to-know basis.

Which brings up interesting question: How many Chinese characters will I need to know...
It's a shame though because you're not likely to have a better opportunity to use your Korean, right?

Did you live in Seoul?

I do plan on living in Japan, eventually. That's why I felt like I needed to learn those extra characters.


Wikipedia saya that about 2,000 are needed for basic literacy (for example, to read a Chinese newspaper), & a well-educated person will know well in excess of 4,000 to 5,000 characters.


Yeah, I probably won't get a better opportunity. There are a lot of Koreans in Japan but many of them are monolingual in Japanese...
I lived in a city called Suwon (kor: 수원/水原) which is the capital city of Gyeonggi Province (kor: 경기도/京畿道). Suwon is part of the Seoul National Capital Area.

That's what I mean. I'm not sure how many I'll need for my needs - do I want to read Chinese literature, for example?
Well, Korea's not far. But the Japanese are a very homogeneous people, aren't they.
Interesting. Did you spend a lot of time in the capital?

Not as much as I would have liked. I only went to Seoul like 5 times during those 10 months. I should have gone more often.