Is it true that over half of Korean vocabulary is recognizable as Chinese?
http://forum.wordreference.com/showpost.php?p=2561027&postcount=5
Sorry, this is a very old post.
Be careful what you mean by "recognizable as Chinese".
Being Korean, they probably wouldn't recognize which words were "Chinese" unless they were told.
Don't expect a Chinese to recognize them either... being a Chinese, let me explain.
The stats provided saying that 69% of Korean are of Chinese origin. If you randomly chose any of those words and blindly read them to a Chinese speaker, there's a good chance they would have no idea what you just said (without additional help). Therefore, "not recognizable as Chinese" anymore...
The region of land we now refer to as "China" like Korea had a rich history dominated by people who don't necessarily speak the same oral language (today it is known as their dialects). Today we're all trying to speak Mandarin and although we're in much better shape than before, we've still got work to do. And although the written script was unified during the first Chinese dynasty, variations to the spoken language are as varied as Spanish is to French to Portugues to Italian (Roman empire being the Chinese empire, except the Chinese empire didn't fall).
The 69% of Korean of Chinese origin were probably absorbed into the Korean culture at different periods of time during Chinese history. The pronounciations are not consistent and some were Korean-nized.
Consider the following scenario which has happened to me before (how I got interested in Korean).
If a Korean were to randomly speak to me one of those words of Chinese origin, i'd say ... Hmm.. that doesn't sound like Mandarin (main Chinese dialect). And when they showed me the Hanja equivalent, I'd say "Ahh". That sounds close to modern Cantonese (Hong Kong and nearby regions), or some other classical chinese dialect I know of...