Yes, as I stated above, the stated opinions of this doctor do not belie such an objective, but this certain myth, if it holds any weight among Korean perceptions regarding autism, would, at the very least, be championed among those opposed to teaching our kids a foreign language.

A plethora of environmental factors have been proposed as potential risk factors over the years and there is, as of yet, a lack of any substantiation of such claims. To the contrary, increased risk of developing autism has been correlated to some specific embryonic developmental abnormalities, known as teratogens.

個人的には、外国語教育は早期に行ったほうがより効果的だと思います。抵抗があるのは言語を単なる道具だとみなすような傾向があるからではないでしょうか？言語は意思疎通や自己表現などの為の道具であって、知性や感性などを磨くことが最終的な目的であると考えていると、単純に外国語教育に熱をあげている人たちに違和感を覚えるのかなと思います。私は強制されるのならピアノとかにして欲しいと思いますが…

母国語を満足に喋れない子供に外国語を教えるというのはどうも抵抗があるんですよね。なぜなんでしょうか？もちろん家庭環境によっては２カ国語以上話す必要性があるのでそれは例外ですが。

The reason many Asians have a difficult time pronouncing words in English is not physiological — as in, it can be remedied if say, a Japanese person learns to make the proper shapes with their mouth. According to many of my Japanese-American friends, learning English is also difficult because there are various pronunciations for each letter combination — things inexpressible through the “soft” and “hard” vowel characterisations that students are often taught in school.

I’ve met quite a few people here in Tokyo who can speak impeccable English — some of then learned it over time, others learned both Japanese and English simultaneously as young children.

Personally, this whole pronunciation issue is comparable — in my eyes — to the rolling of the “r” that many other languages use.

「なして避けんといかんと？」

になります。私は発育時期に標準語教育を強制されましたが、現在抱えている様々な問題と関連しているかは分かりません。

“What’s wrong with speaking English with an accent anyway? Many parents tend to discount the importance of a well-rounded education,”

The article mentions that

From toddlers to students to office workers, learning English has become a national obsession.

However, it also quote a comment made by Cha Kyoung-ae, a professor who teaches English at a local university:

“The surgery may be an extreme case but it reflects a social phenomenon,” said Cha.

I don’t have enough knowledge on autism, but in my understanding, associating autism with rearing environment and/or mental weakness is old prejudice against autism and other related disorders, and such prejudice is now considered harmful. Maybe, it rather reflects ignorance of Al Jazeera writer?

When there is a difficult word to understand, Koreans usually resort to see the Chinese characters.

Koreans use Chinese characters indirectly. They still 100% acknowledge them. You have to actually live in South Korea to see Koreans using Chinese characters non-ostensibly.

How a famous American professor of Korean studies put this. “Koreans still respect and utilize the Chinese characters, contrary to the fact that they don’t directly use them every day.”

It’s the similar idea how Vietnamese uses Roman alphabets 100% and yet a huge chuck of their vocabularies are Chinese in origin.

例えば

Thedog(Canislupusfamiliaris,[2]pronounced/ˈkeɪ.nɪsˈluːpəsfʌˈmɪliɛərɪs/)isadomesticatedformoftheWolf,amemberoftheCanidaefamilyoftheorderCarnivora.Thetermisusedforbothferalandpetvarieties.Thedomesticdoghasbeenoneofthemostwidelykeptworkingandcompanionanimalsinhumanhistory.Amongstcanineenthusiasts,theword”dog”mayalsomeanthemaleofacaninespecies,asopposedtotheword”bitch”forthefemaleofthespecies.

これも読めない事はありませんが・・・長続きしません

As kanji is a logographic writing systems where each character carries a meaning, people used to reading it can form a partial mental image of the intended meaning by just looking at the individual characters, even before the combination of them in a word invokes a form of visual recognition for the written term (which is the case in any language for fluent speakers anyways)
In normal usage, the combination of kanji and hiragana lets readers easily recognize discrete chunks of ideas in the writing, much in the same way that writing in alphabet systems have words representing discrete ideas separated by spaces.
So, taking out kanji from Japanese is removing the element which lets people identify the units of ideas in the sentence, soitcanbecomparedtowritingoutsentencesinEnglishwithoutusingspaces. Reading it is not impossible, but annoyingly hard.

To back this notion up, textbooks for young kids in 1st or 2nd grade who haven’t learned a lot of kanji tend to have their hiragana-only writing interspersed with spaces to make it easier to identify the words.

Also in the case of English and many western languages, knowledge of Greek/Latin roots lets people easily discern the meaning of unfamiliar terms, much in the same way that knowledge of kanji can let people accurately guess the meaning of unfamiliar Japanese words in kanji.

What fuels the perception that Koreans are handicapped with their writing is in fact the similarity of the Korean language to Japanese. Hangul does not have the luxury of composing elements like Greek/Latin roots, but Koreans are said to be increasingly neglecting and forgetting the use of hanja(kanji), so the closest analogy would become Japanese sans kanji.
Although hanja falling into disuse is apparently false according to lacrimosa, whenever I come across Korean writing, I’ve noticed a distinct lack of hanja with Korean writing being uniformly hangul. So I’m still doubtful as to whether hanja usage is widespread enough to be acting as the convenient tool that kanji is in Japanese.

@asagiri – 漢字は考えていることを書く時の優秀な道具です。認めます。でも、人間は字を書こうとしたよりはるか先に問題なく高度なコミュニケーション出来ましたよ。お釈迦様の教えは最初書かれなかったとか。孔子は漢字で自分の考えていることを書き残したが、その時代ではほとんどの人は字を読むことが出来なかった。なのに、孔子または彼の弟子がその人たちに儒教を教えることが出来、中国社会が儒教中心になった。

だから漢字があってもなくっても、高度な論理でも意味を伝えられます。伝え方をちょっと考えなければならないかも知れませんが、伝えられます。

There is a serious misconception among Japanese that all Koreans don’t use Chinese characters at all. That’s not true.

http://www.hanja114.org/main/index.php

The South Korean government has the official educational license for people who know over 2000 Chinese characters. This is mostly if you want to become a public worker in a Korean city.

>>LBさん(17:54:44 )日本人が字を書かないと高度な論理的思考でき
ないですか？話すだけで無理ってこと？

LBさんは字を書かずに大学水準の数学の問題を聞いて、頭の中だけ
で解く事が可能なのですか？文章に記録しないで、科学技術を蓄積
する事が可能と言うのですか？

I find this scenario to be more feasible than a neuro-psychologist, who specializes in childhood neurological disorders (albeit concentrating primarily on adolescent attention deficit disorder and OCD) at a major university and publishes in the English literature (and presumably follows the literature to some extent) would honestly hold a view that early childhood language acquisition correlates to increased rates of autism.

Autism is largely not a visible issue in most countries and is misunderstood in every country, especially by parents stricken with autistic children and feel the need to find some sort of solace or understanding where none is available. Though these mistaken causal correlations are manifestly different in my societies. In North America this would be epitomized in the anti-vaccination movement. This mistaken causal link, however, is not an idea which operates in a vacuum and is fueled largely by a general mistrust of science and the medical establishment. While one would be correct in saying that this is a mistaken perception of autism in North American society, it does not discount the fueling force behind such misconceptions themselves. Now, not all persons supporting this misconception may be aware of the underlying motivations behind its propagation, but that does not discount the misconception itself from having those motivations.

Though establishing underlying thought structures behind a belief such as this is insufficient given the very small snippet available to us (I can find no other examples of this specific belief in the English literature, both academic and popular), my suspicions for the cause of this misunderstanding cannot be completely dismissed, though you are free to disagree and find them highly unlikely and my suspicions do not equate my passing a definitive judgment, either.

Go talk to any random “person on the street” about autism and not many will have bloody clue.

Kanji is a tool to make understanding the written word easier (at least as used in Japan and Korea, we’ll leave Chinese out of the equation). But it is not a tool to enable thought – thoughts come first, then the spoken word, then the written word. To say that Koreans could not carry on a high-level of discourse if they were using only Hangul, or that Japanese could not do it using only Hiragana, is mistaken.

LB said:

…complex logical thought is not possible with Japanese using only hiragana.

Objection!

If this were true, it would mean that languages without kanji (virtually all languages on this blue planet) would not be capable of higher rational thinking. Pythagoras, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Kant, Hegel, Albert Einstein … are they all high-school graduate level?

Or in other words, are you saying that the Japanese are incapable of higher rational thought without writing it out? Not merely by speaking it?

fg replied:

Likely in Korea’s case, throughout their history they did not have the opportunity to translate western jargon and technical terms into Hangul.
In the case of Japan, especially during the Meiji era, there is a history of creating new terms by combining kanji to translate terms in all ranges of fields in Western philosophy, medicine and technology.
So I think it’s more of a case of the course the country took in history rather than issues with the language itself. For Koreans living in modern times it probably means it’s quicker and makes more sense to learn English and study abroad in America.

Also this is my personal opinion but perhaps the historical continuity of languages over the long term may be related to the power of a nation.

漢字は極めて優秀な記憶装置です。例えば”炎”という単語を日本語で
記述するならば”ほのお”の3文字、英語で記述するならば”flame”の5
文字を必要とします。漢字ならば一文字で表現出来、火が2つ、さら
には炎の漢字の形状から炎の意味を初めて学ぶにしても、容易に理解
出来、なおかつ記憶として残りやすい。これが漢字のすごい所です。

表音文字のみで構成された言語、例えば英語やドイツ語は表音文字だ
けで高度な思考が可能な様に単語、文法などが決められているのです
。しかし日本語や韓国語の単語には漢字語由来のものが多くあります。
だから漢字が分からないと、単語の意味を厳密に思い浮かぶ事が出来
ず、理解の定着も弱い。

/ひょうおんもじのみでこうせいされたげんご、たとえばえいごやど
いつごはひょうおんもじだけでこうどなしこうがかのうなようにたん
ご、ぶんぽうなどがきめられているのです。しかしにほんごやかんこ
くごのたんどにはかんじごゆらいのものがおおくあります。だからか
んじがわからないと、たんごのいみをげんみつにおもいうかぶことが
できず、りかいのていちゃくもよわい。/
LBさん、例えばあなたが漢字が全く分からずひらがなのみ分かると仮
定して//内の文章を厳密に理解する事が出来ますか？文章では無く、
会話の中で言われて、厳密に理解できますか？大学の教科書が全て//
内の様なひらがなのみで書かれていたらどうですか？

翻訳して下さったhelicalさん、Weirdoさんありがとうございます。
fgさんも補足ありがとうございます。

“An anonymous patient says he got the surgery because he heard it improves one’s KISSing ability.”

Do you now understand something about Japanese TV production?

あくまでも持論ですが、言語の歴史的継続性は長期的に見ると国力にも関係してくるのではないでしょうか。

意義有り！

これが本当だとすれば、漢字がない言語（すなわちこの青い惑星にあるほとんどの言語）では高度な論理的思考が不可能になります。ピタゴラス、プラトン、トマス・アクィナス、デカルト、フランシス・ベーコン、ジョン・ロック、カント、ヘーゲル、アルベルト・アインシュタイン。。。皆高卒のレベルですか？

別の言い方とすれば、日本人が字を書かないと高度な論理的思考できないですか？話すだけで無理ってこと？

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana

i hope some Japanese mothers do not see this and consider it a possibility and head on over, considering the cheap surgery prices oo;

cosmetic surgery is so odd…but ah… and welcome to Korea Probe ^^;

Modern Korean composed solely of Hangul alone is not enough to attain a high level of education. High school is probably the limit. If one were to give a Japanese example of Korean, it would be Japanese composed entirely of hiragana. Any person who can understand Japanese can probably understand that hiragana alone is not enough to attain a high level of education. Therefore, when Koreans want to attain higher levels of education, they must learn either Kanji or English. If one were to study abroad in an English speaking country, they would learn English. Within Korea, prestigious universities abroad are valued much higher than domestic ones. This is why they resort to such extreme measures such as tongue surgery.

なら他の科目も避けんと

Just because one doctor believes that learning a language can cause autism doesn’t mean all of Korea believes it too….

One cannot study advanced academics in modern Korean using only Hangul. High school level academics is about as far as one can progress.
To equate it to Japanese, it’s Japanese using only hiragana. Anyone who understands Japanese will understand that complex logical thought is not possible with Japanese using only hiragana.

Therefore, if Koreans wish to learn college-level academics, they must learn either kanji or English.

It will be English if they are to study overseas, primarily in an English-speaking country, and it’s much more valuable to enter a prestigious university overseas than domestic colleges. This is the reason behind their overzealous English education which goes as far as performing surgery on their tongues.

Why on EARTH where they playing the KISS song “I Was Made For Loving You” while they were showing the surgery? o_o;

Assuming that you’re based in Japan. Go talk to Koreans about autism and they’ll have three very different definitions. This isn’t nationalism. This is about having wrongful ideas and opinions on autism.

Yeah. From a gaijin or Japanese perspective, everything about Korea is deeply nationalist. What a brilliant (and very misleading) judgment.

従って韓国人が大学水準の高度な学問を学ぶには、漢字または
英語を学ぶ必要があります。

海外、主に英語圏の国へ留学するならば英語になり、韓国内で
は海外の名門大学に入学する方が、国内の大学よりずっと価値
があるのです。彼らの舌を手術するまでの過剰な英語教育には
この様な事情があるのです。

/私の貧弱な英語力では、この文章を翻訳する事が出来ません。
どなたか翻訳して下さるとありがたいです。

Though I could find no specific study targeting the incidence of second language acquisition and rates of autism, all large-scale epidemiological studies have failed to find any correlation between multi-lingual households and the incidence of autism. Also, all studies which have attempted to correlate autism with psychological disorders, such has childhood traumatic experiences (which may or may not be the implicit given the quotation stated above) have also failed to demonstrate any degree of plausibility as a causal factor and all attempts to treat ASD as a psychological condition have failed to show any significant merit as a basis for treatment.