flOvermind wrote:Kirby wrote:I think it's for this reason that, sometimes in Korean newspapers, you'll see an ambiguous word, and the chinese characters will be shown in parentheses behind it. This helps to clarify any ambiguity that may arise from guessing what the hidden hanja are.
I'm curious: Doesn't the same ambiguity arise in spoken language? If so, you'd have the same problem in spoken Japanese. Or are there differences in how you pronounce the word, despite it being written exactly the same?
Yes. In spoken language, both Korean and Japanese can have this ambiguity. It exists in English, too, for homonyms.
There can be differences in how different parts of the word are stressed, though. They actually have dictionaries for this - so though two words have the "same pronunciation", they may have stress on different syllables.
I'm not great with knowing what parts of a word to stress, though. If you have the pronunciation correct with the wrong stress, you are typically still understandable, but people just realize more that you are a foreigner. I should work on getting the correct syllable stress from now on.
