How to spot English loanwords and Hanja words in a text?

Question

While studying Japanese, it's very helpful that nearly all words of foreign origin are marked by using katakana (a syllabary separate from the usual mix of hiragana and Chinese characters) and words based on Chinese readings of characters are usually also recognizable by the absence of additional hiragana characters. While this graphical distinction of words of different etymological background is absent in modern Korean writing, it might be possible nevertheless to guess which words are of (say) English or Chinese origin, by looking at the occurring sound combinations and orthographic features. For example, strong consonants and syllables with two final consonants seem to occur only in native Korean vocabulary, while words ending in eu (e.g. 테니스) are commonly derived from Western words ending in a consonant. Any other heuristics?

Answer 1

For English loanwords, there are a couple signs:

-if there are a lot of "hard/aspirated" consonants in the word. In Korean, the "hard" consonants most closely resemble most of the corresponding consonants in English, so coffee is "커피", with the "ㅋ" and "ㅍ" being the hard/aspirated counterparts of "ㄱ" and "ㅂ". And additionally, Koreans don't have an "F" letter or sound, so the "F" sound in coffee is represented with the aspirated "ㅍ" letter instead.

-In Korean, consonants at the end of words are not distinctly pronounced, unless they are followed by vowels. So, "맛" is spelled with the characters "m+a+s" but is pronounced more like "m+a+t" with the t at the end not strongly/thoroughly pronounced. However, in English loanwords, the "으" vowel is added onto words that end in a consonant in order to replicate our more drawn-out pronunciation of these ending consonants. So, "Christmas" would be "크리스마스", with the "s" at the end represented as "스", or "su" in order to draw the sound out more like english pronunciation. This is also why Korean (and Japanese) learners of English often add "u" or "으" sounds at the end of words.

For Hanja, it would be quite difficult to recognize them without some existing knowledge of another sinitic language, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, or (peripherally) Japanese. Years ago, before I learned any Cantonese, I had very little luck in learning Hanja, and it seemed counterproductive to do so, especially given how simple/easy to read Hangul is compared to Hanja. However, after learning Cantonese (and some Japanese) I found that just by hearing/reading the pronunciation of many words I could recognize them as Hanja-based, given their similarity in phonetics. For example, the word for King, "왕" (wang) is 王 (wong) in Cantonese, and thus just hearing the Korean word made me think of its Cantonese counterpart, and recognize it as Hanja. Also, most legitimate Korean-English dictionaries will have the Hanja next to the Hangul for each words if they are of sinitic origin, another good thing to pay attention to when looking words up.

Answer 2

Honestly, I would say as a speaker and teacher to others not just in Korean I am more so used to seeing more so "foreign type" words that do not necessarily fit in with the language normally. So for example, a native Arabic speaker may recognize words that do not sound similar to any other typical Arabic words. In Korean it is a tad easier if you are not only able to read Hangul, but if you are able to recognize the patterns in Korean as well.

Prime example, words like 라디오 (radio), they have more of an English tone seeing as its a loanword. Therefore, it comes much easier to identify when you study the language more. Look into researching about English loan words seeing as if you understand the concept, things become easier.

Hanja, on the other hand is much easier to spot however the accuracy of it varies. There are a lot of iotated vowels in Hanja which is more common than in native Korean language. There is also a vast amount more of compound vowels compared to native Korean speech/ language.