Hanja follies

Hanja is a tricky beast ain’t she? She tempts us with her interweaving of Chinese, Japanese and Korean root words and then spits in our face when things start looking like a big mess of spilt spaghetti on the page. When first venturing into the brave world of 한문 I found that a lot of the basic characters looked similar. When I would put pen to paper, I’d find myself mixing up strokes and wondering why three different letters all looked the same. Here are some of the first words that tripped me up:

한글
한자
영어
들어가다
to enter
사람
person
아홉
nine

dirt
king
life
year
일천
one thousand

fire
작은
small
적은
few