South Korean students flock to Japan • Hacker News Board

Re: South Korean students flock to Japan

#51

Post by ezoe » Tue, May 14, 2019, 6:30 AM UTC

tanilama wrote: post #49

nemonemo wrote: post #25

South Korean here. My anecdata: some of my friends went to Japan for advanced degrees. Most of them came back within a couple of years after their study. 10x or more people around me went to US. The majority of them are still in the country after a few years. Such tendency was remarkable to me, given the difficulty of learning English and relative ease of learning Japanese by Koreans. There is one thing I can't under…

But Koreans are still required to learn Kanjis right? Even with many shared/loan words through history, learning several thousands characters still doesn't feel easy enough to me. While in many countries, people start learning English when they are in elementary schools. Upon until getting out of college, that is some decent years spent on English alone. While the language itself is significantly different, more read…

You still have to learn a lot of irregular spellings in English or any other natural languages anyway. Even if the spelling is perfectly regular, you still have to learn a lot of words. At that sense, it's no harder than any other languages.

Re: South Korean students flock to Japan

#52

Post by nemonemo » Tue, May 14, 2019, 6:32 AM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #36

theaustinseven wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan invaded the Korean peninsula as well as a sizeable portion of China and enacted horribly cruel war crimes against the citizens of those places. I won't get into details, but this comment would be akin to asking "What's the history between the Germans and Jews? Why don't they like each other?". The primary difference being that Germany had a reckoning with the history of what happened during that time, while the…

It's worth pointing out, I think, that nowadays most Germans and Jews get along perfectly fine, despite their history a few generations ago. So just citing that case isn't a full explanation of the enmity between Japanese and Koreans.

They do like each other. Koreans love Japanese food and many Japanese also like Korean food. They watch TV shows from each other. Many TV shows are often just translated versions from the other country.

It's actually the politicians who want the people to have enmity to each other and some people are vulnerable to the propaganda. The existence of the North Korea regime and their history of kidnapping Japanese people also don't help. Much of their economic strength also overlaps, so there's competition as well.

If you still don't understand, think about close European countries. They probably get along just fine, but Brexit happened..

Re: South Korean students flock to Japan

#53

Post by senozhatsky » Tue, May 14, 2019, 6:35 AM UTC

nemonemo wrote: post #25

South Korean here. My anecdata: some of my friends went to Japan for advanced degrees. Most of them came back within a couple of years after their study. 10x or more people around me went to US. The majority of them are still in the country after a few years. Such tendency was remarkable to me, given the difficulty of learning English and relative ease of learning Japanese by Koreans. There is one thing I can't under…

> There is one thing I can't understand from the article: it says a low birth rate as a reason of an increase in migration. Why would a low birth rate lead to more migration?

Good question. My understanding is that (from the article)

    The low birthrate is leading to severe labor shortages ... prompting the
    country to welcome more foreign workers.

So foreign workers (e.g. from South-East Asia?) make it harder for Koreans to find a job in SK? But it's all the same (severe labor shortages) in Japan, if not worse.

Re: South Korean students flock to Japan

#54

Post by user982 » Tue, May 14, 2019, 6:41 AM UTC

duckonomy wrote: post #39

jpatokal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, Korea was repeatedly invaded by Japan. More recently, Korea was a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945, during which the Japanese ruled with an iron fist and did their best to destroy Korean identity by forcing people to take Japanese names etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_under_Japanese_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan%E2%80%93Korea...

The identity-destroying part only came after 1938. They were trying to do 내선일체 [內鮮一體] (not sure how to translate this in English). Before that, they actually helped Koreans learn Hangul. I was also very anti-Japan as a I grew up under typical Korean parents. But after reading the actual history, there were some good parts during the colonization. Although, I'm not denying the horrific parts caused by war. But that's…

> The identity-destroying part only came after 1938. They were trying to do 내선일체 [內鮮一體] (not sure how to translate this in English). Before that, they actually helped Koreans learn Hangul.

Banning Hangul and erasing Korea's independent cultural identity intentionally traced the pattern of Japan's nearly identical actions a few decades earlier in conquering Ryukyu, including classifying each suppressed language as a "dialect" of Japanese.

As a contrast to Korea, the former Ryukyu Kingdom is now fully subsumed as the Okinawan islands and its original languages, religions, and culture are, in practice, nearly extinct.

Re: South Korean students flock to Japan

#55

Post by kijin » Tue, May 14, 2019, 6:58 AM UTC

senozhatsky wrote: post #53

nemonemo wrote: post #25

South Korean here. My anecdata: some of my friends went to Japan for advanced degrees. Most of them came back within a couple of years after their study. 10x or more people around me went to US. The majority of them are still in the country after a few years. Such tendency was remarkable to me, given the difficulty of learning English and relative ease of learning Japanese by Koreans. There is one thing I can't under…

> There is one thing I can't understand from the article: it says a low birth rate as a reason of an increase in migration. Why would a low birth rate lead to more migration? Good question. My understanding is that (from the article) The low birthrate is leading to severe labor shortages ... prompting the country to welcome more foreign workers. So foreign workers (e.g. from South-East Asia?) make it harder for Korea…

"Labor shortage" in the context of high unemployment (edit: as in South Korea, not Japan) usually just means, from the point of view of employers, a shortage of suckers who are willing to accept low wages.

Besides, the birth rate in SK hovered between 1.4 and 1.5 during much of the 80s and 90s, and only dropped to current levels (around 1.1) since the early 2000s. Most people who are looking for jobs right now were born in the 90s; the ultra-low-birth-rate generation is still in K-12. It's a lame excuse.

Foreign workers are willing to accept the kind of crappy treatment that most young Koreans would not hesitate to report to the authorities. That's why they're hired and Koreans are not. Then the Koreans become foreign workers in Japan...

Re: South Korean students flock to Japan

#56

Post by barry-cotter » Tue, May 14, 2019, 7:21 AM UTC

tanilama wrote: post #49

nemonemo wrote: post #25

South Korean here. My anecdata: some of my friends went to Japan for advanced degrees. Most of them came back within a couple of years after their study. 10x or more people around me went to US. The majority of them are still in the country after a few years. Such tendency was remarkable to me, given the difficulty of learning English and relative ease of learning Japanese by Koreans. There is one thing I can't under…

But Koreans are still required to learn Kanjis right? Even with many shared/loan words through history, learning several thousands characters still doesn't feel easy enough to me. While in many countries, people start learning English when they are in elementary schools. Upon until getting out of college, that is some decent years spent on English alone. While the language itself is significantly different, more read…

Koreans learn the hanja, which are basically identical to traditional Chinese characters (hanzi) in secondary school. Kanji are more divergent from hanzi than kanji and if you want to be able to read a newspaper or textbook you’d probably need to add about 700 characters to the 1800 generally taught in Korea but that is a massive leg up. Japanese and Korean have very similar morphemes and grammar. And English education in Korea is historically dire though improving. They are not going to be mastering English after secondary school, on average.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja

> South Korean primary schools abandoned the teaching of Hanja in 1971, although they are still taught as part of the mandatory curriculum in grade 6. They are taught in separate courses in South Korean high schools, separately from the normal Korean-language curriculum. Formal Hanja education begins in grade 7 (junior high school) and continues until graduation from senior high school in grade 12. A total of 1,800 Hanja are taught: 900 for junior high, and 900 for senior high (starting in grade 10).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Japanese_and_Kor...

> Japanese and Korean both have an agglutinative morphology in which verbs may function as prefixes[13] and a subject–object–verb (SOV) typology.[14][15][16] They are both topic-prominent, null-subject languages. Both languages rely heavily on turning nouns into verbs utilizing "to do" (する and 하다).

> Modern Korean and Japanese share a similar system of demonstrative pronouns: i- (이), ku- (그) and ce- (저) for Korean corresponding to the Japanese ko- (こ), so- (そ) and a- (あ)(“this”, “that” and “that over there”). They both lack a compulsory distinction of plurality (for example "an apple" vs "apples" is usually not specifically distinguished).

Re: South Korean students flock to Japan

#57

Post by barry-cotter » Tue, May 14, 2019, 7:24 AM UTC

kijin wrote: post #55

senozhatsky wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is one thing I can't understand from the article: it says a low birth rate as a reason of an increase in migration. Why would a low birth rate lead to more migration? Good question. My understanding is that (from the article) The low birthrate is leading to severe labor shortages ... prompting the country to welcome more foreign workers. So foreign workers (e.g. from South-East Asia?) make it harder for Korea…

"Labor shortage" in the context of high unemployment (edit: as in South Korea, not Japan) usually just means, from the point of view of employers, a shortage of suckers who are willing to accept low wages. Besides, the birth rate in SK hovered between 1.4 and 1.5 during much of the 80s and 90s, and only dropped to current levels (around 1.1) since the early 2000s. Most people who are looking for jobs right now were b…

Japan has low unemployment, not high.

https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/unemployment-rate

> The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in Japan increased unexpectedly to 2.5 percent in March 2019 from a five-month low of 2.3 percent in the previous month

Re: South Korean students flock to Japan

#58

Post by kijin » Tue, May 14, 2019, 7:50 AM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #57

kijin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Labor shortage" in the context of high unemployment (edit: as in South Korea, not Japan) usually just means, from the point of view of employers, a shortage of suckers who are willing to accept low wages. Besides, the birth rate in SK hovered between 1.4 and 1.5 during much of the 80s and 90s, and only dropped to current levels (around 1.1) since the early 2000s. Most people who are looking for jobs right now were b…

Japan has low unemployment, not high. https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/unemployment-rate > The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in Japan increased unexpectedly to 2.5 percent in March 2019 from a five-month low of 2.3 percent in the previous month

Sorry for the confusion. I was responding to the parent's last line where he asked about foreign workers and labor shortage in SK. Edited to clarify which country I'm talking about.

Re: South Korean students flock to Japan

#59

Post by wodenokoto » Tue, May 14, 2019, 7:51 AM UTC

nemonemo wrote: post #25

South Korean here. My anecdata: some of my friends went to Japan for advanced degrees. Most of them came back within a couple of years after their study. 10x or more people around me went to US. The majority of them are still in the country after a few years. Such tendency was remarkable to me, given the difficulty of learning English and relative ease of learning Japanese by Koreans. There is one thing I can't under…

> some of my friends went to Japan for advanced degrees. Most of them came back within a couple of years after their study. 10x or more people around me went to US. The majority of them are still in the country after a few years.

My thinking is that Japanese and Korean work culture is quite similar. So if you want to live in that culture, why not do it closer to your family?

However, if you get smitten by a more western lifestyle in the US or Europe, it will be very hard to return home.

Re: South Korean students flock to Japan

#60

Post by tanilama » Tue, May 14, 2019, 7:51 AM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #56

tanilama wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Koreans are still required to learn Kanjis right? Even with many shared/loan words through history, learning several thousands characters still doesn't feel easy enough to me. While in many countries, people start learning English when they are in elementary schools. Upon until getting out of college, that is some decent years spent on English alone. While the language itself is significantly different, more read…

Koreans learn the hanja, which are basically identical to traditional Chinese characters (hanzi) in secondary school. Kanji are more divergent from hanzi than kanji and if you want to be able to read a newspaper or textbook you’d probably need to add about 700 characters to the 1800 generally taught in Korea but that is a massive leg up. Japanese and Korean have very similar morphemes and grammar. And English educati…

From my interaction with Korean people here in US, since the modern Korean language has moved on to its indigenous Hangul system, their ability to understand Hanja is limited, nor do they need such ability in daily life.