Scripts and languages

Open it after playing: the correct answers are here.

1. Question 1. Who commissioned the hangeul alphabet in 1443?

   • King Sejong
   • King Taejo
   • Admiral Yi Sun-sin
   • The monk Wonhyo

   Answer: King Sejong. Sejong the Great promulgated the hunminjeongeum in 1446 to give the people an accessible script, having previously been forced to write in Chinese characters. The consonant letters depict the position of the speech organs: an alphabet designed, not inherited.

2. Question 2. How many letters does modern hangeul have?

   • 14
   • 24
   • 40
   • 52

   Answer: 24. Fourteen consonants and ten basic vowels, twenty-four letters in all, combined into syllable blocks. Doubled consonants and diphthongs bring the working inventory to around forty signs.

3. Question 3. How many everyday-use kanji (jōyō) are officially listed in Japan?

   • 881
   • 1,945
   • 2,136
   • 5,000

   Answer: 2,136. The jōyō list revised in 2010 holds 2,136 characters, against 1,945 in the 1981 version. It defines what an adult is expected to read, and what the press may use without furigana.

4. Question 4. How many tones does standard Mandarin have?

   • Two
   • Four, plus a neutral tone
   • Six
   • Nine

   Answer: Four, plus a neutral tone. Mandarin distinguishes four tones plus an unstressed neutral syllable. Cantonese has six, sometimes described as nine depending on how closed syllables are counted: one reason it sounds harder to the ear.

5. Question 5. What is pinyin for?

   • Simplifying characters
   • Transcribing Mandarin in the Latin alphabet
   • Sorting characters by radical
   • Notating cursive calligraphy

   Answer: Transcribing Mandarin in the Latin alphabet. Adopted in 1958, hanyu pinyin writes Mandarin pronunciation in Latin letters with tone marks. It is used for literacy teaching, keyboard input and international proper names: it is what turned Peking into Beijing in the English-language press.

6. Question 6. What are katakana mainly used for in Japanese?

   • Writing grammatical endings
   • Transcribing loanwords and onomatopoeia
   • Writing surnames
   • Marking politeness

   Answer: Transcribing loanwords and onomatopoeia. Katakana write foreign loanwords, scientific names, onomatopoeia and sometimes emphasis. Hiragana carry the grammar: particles, verb endings and Japanese words with no common kanji.

7. Question 7. When were simplified Chinese characters officially adopted?

   • In the 1910s
   • In the 1950s
   • In the 1980s
   • In the 2000s

   Answer: In the 1950s. The first official list appeared in 1956, completed in 1964. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau kept traditional characters, so two systems coexist for the same written language.

8. Question 8. Which word order do Japanese and Korean share?

   • Subject - verb - object
   • Subject - object - verb
   • Verb - subject - object
   • Object - verb - subject

   Answer: Subject - object - verb. Both languages put the verb last and mark grammatical roles with postposed particles, which makes translating between them far more direct than with Chinese, whose subject-verb-object structure resembles English.

9. Question 9. What are furigana?

   • Small kana giving a kanji’s reading
   • Punctuation marks
   • Sorting radicals
   • Postal abbreviations

   Answer: Small kana giving a kanji’s reading. Furigana are printed above or beside the character, in hiragana. They serve beginning readers, proper names with unpredictable readings and, in manga, give a kanji an offbeat reading that plays on two meanings at once.

10. Question 10. How many strokes does the most complex character still in common Chinese use have?

    • 16
    • 24
    • 30
    • 57

    Answer: 57. Biáng, used only to name the biangbiang noodles of Shaanxi, takes fifty-seven strokes in its traditional form. It appears in no official dictionary and is passed on through a mnemonic verse.