(Published: 2025-10-02 16:45:38)
October 9th is one of my favorite holidays: Hangeul Day. The holiday is the only public holiday in the world to honor a writing system and one of the few to honor language. North Korea honors Hangeul on January 15th as a national, not a public, holiday. Over the years, I have been honored to share my thoughts on Hangeul, particularly from a linguistic perspective. As a writing system, it is a wonder of simplicity and linguistic engineering that remains perhaps Korea’s greatest contribution to human history.
Hangeul Day also offers a chance to pause and think about language in a broad sense, as a linguist and lifelong language learner. Over the years, my thoughts have been remarkably settled on the idea that language learning is important, both to individuals and to society at large.
This year, the third year of the boom in generative AI chatbots, my thoughts are beginning to change as the various chatbots have continued to improve in their handling of languages. Other social changes, such as social media use, have also forced me to question long-held ideas about language, particularly about Chinese characters.
I have long extolled the benefits of learning Chinese characters, both for native speakers of Korean and foreigners learning the language as a second language. Chinese characters first entered Korea in the Three Kingdoms Era, and classical Chinese became the dominant written language. Even after Hangeul was invented, classical Chinese remained the dominant written language until the last years of the 19th century, when Hangeul was adopted for official use.
The length and depth of classical Chinese influence mean that Korean vocabulary has a large number of words that derive from Chinese characters. This is particularly true for academic and specialized fields where Chinese-origin vocabulary comprises 70 to 80 percent of the vocabulary. The situation is not unusual, however, because words of Latin origin play a similar role in English and other European languages.
Japanese and Vietnamese also have a large vocabulary derived from Chinese characters. Japanese continues to use Chinese characters, but Vietnamese switched to a modified Roman alphabet in the early 20th century. For Koreans, knowledge of Chinese characters gives access to a large vocabulary that makes learning Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese easier because most characters have the same meaning and a similar pronunciation. For example, the Chinese character for “big” is pronounced “dae” in Korean, “dà” in Mandarin Chinese, “dai” in Japanese, and “đại” in Vietnamese.
Knowledge of classical Chinese gives access to important texts of Confucianism and Daoism that influenced Korean culture and thought. Important works by Korean philosophers were written in classical Chinese, as was the Buddhist canon that took root in Korea.
My argument for learning Chinese characters, by Koreans and learners of Korean, has been strong. Chinese characters help expand Korean vocabulary and give access to much of Korea’s cultural heritage. They make it easier to learn the languages of nearby nations with deep economic ties to and interaction with South Korea. Others have argued that Chinese characters help improve mental discipline and writing skills.
The boom in AI chatbots and social changes in the 21st century have caused me to reassess my ideas. Chinese characters have never been easy to learn, and the rote memorization and practice required to do so takes time. Writing is especially difficult, and few Japanese adults can write all of the nearly 2,000 characters that they are taught in school. The same most likely holds true for Chinese adults.
The spread of computers and later smartphones in China and Japan means that people now input Chinese characters from a keyboard using Romanization instead of writing them on paper. In Japan in the early 2000s, I remember hearing worries about how the spread of computers was having a negative effect on writing Chinese characters. With the addition of smartphones into the equation, few people outside of school classrooms now write Chinese characters in extended texts.
Learning Chinese characters takes time away from learning and doing other things. In the complex 21st century, students need to learn more about older subjects in the humanities as well as new subjects, like environmental science, global citizenship and health and wellness. They need to participate in task-based group learning to develop social skills. Interacting with historic texts, meanwhile, can be done in Hangeul and enriched with help from AI.
So, on this Hangeul Day, after all these years, I pull back from advocating for Chinese characters and embrace the Hangeul-only position.