1948
The Law concerning Exclusive Use of Hangul was enacted, but this law contained no provisions regarding punishments for violations.

1964-1969
Hanja education was significantly reduced in school.

1970
Hanja education was totally abolished by the Park Jeong-hee regime.

1972
Hanmun (漢文) education was restored as an elective subject in junior high school and high school, but Hanja education at the elementary school level was still not allowed.

2005
Fundamental Law of the National Language was established. Under this law, the use of Chinese characters in government documents was banned in principle.

Currently, Hanja education is allowed in elementary school at the discretion of the principal. Therefore, the school has no Hanja class if the principal feels apathy toward Hanja education.

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This thread provided me with useful information, especially oranckay and H.Kim ones.

The real question is whether the abolition of Hanja will help Korean society and culture over the long haul. In view of the Vietnamese precedent, it may cause a deep-rooted issue that defies any simple solution.

“결국 학교에서 일본어가 제2외국어로 등장한 1972~73년부터 필수과목으로서의 한문교과가 국어과목에서 독립되어 신설됐다. ‘국적이 있는 교육’에 대한 열이 식어 한문이 영어 등에 밀려 선택과목이 된 것은 1990년대 초반이지만,…”

And my hopefully not hopeless translation:

Finally in school, from 1972-73 when Japanese appeared as the 2nd foreign language, Hanmun was established as a compulsory subject, independent from Korean. The enthusiasm for “citizen education” wore off, and Hanmun was pushed aside by English and other subjects, and became an elective subject in the early 1990s….

“There is one big problem with comparing the lack of Chinese character education in Korea with the lack of Latin education in the West, and that is the fact that Chinese is not a dead language. The countries to both the east and west of Korea use Chinese characters, and Chinese characters are still used in Korean books and documents and on Korean signs and historical markers. Will ignorance of Chinese characters seem cute to a Chinese or Japanese businessman who gives a Korean businessman a business card without Korean or English translations?”

If the Korean does not speak Chinese or Japanese, they won’t be able to pronounce the person’s name correctly anyway. Communication in China and Japan requires oral proficiency as well as a reading knowledge of Chinese characters. Koreans and Japanese do have an enormous advantage over Westerners in learning Chinese since they are able to read and write Chinese characters from Lesson One.

Anyhow, this topic confuses me a bit, because I was under the misimpression that hanja education was compulsory. Wasn’t it so at one point? I understand that Park Chung-hee (or his government) did away with it altogether, and then reinstated it in 1973, with the 1800 Basic Hanja for educational use. Everyone in my wife’s family seems to know the basic hanja (except for my sister-in-law, who missed some critical chunk of it because of the temporary ban), and I’m assuming it’s not necessarily out of choice. Did it simply transition to being an optional subject at some point in the last 10 or 20 years?

Slim said, “all-too-human tendency to think that complexity equals brilliance that may be at work here…”

I thinkt that’s a key part of the problem, too. When I talk to non-specialists (people who aren’t writers or language scholars in Korea) about this ( i try not talking about it if I can help myself) most people will call such poor sentences “difficult.” Regular members of the Korean public often fail to even try to differentiate between that which is hard to understand because it was poorly written and that which is hard to understand because the subject matter is difficult and the thoughts complex. There IS such a thing as Korean that is well written but hard to understand and it feels very good to read and you can tell the author worked hard at conveying his thoughts with exacting precision. Maybe I’ll quote an example if I can find.

As for something like Strunk & White. There is PLENTY of that in Korea these days. The problem is that the public doesn’t recognize there’s a problem, as evidenced in the fact pro-hanja edu types can make people think hanja is the problem and in the fact readers of Lee’s piece aren’t on his case.

Anti wrote:

“I’m happy to stand corrected here. I have formed my hunch of the issue from the few comments I remember reading about the OECD survey (and also from my wife’s comments about seeing Korean-language official formulae after living 20 years away from Korea”

I clicked on the link and read the example of your native Korean wife finding Finnish technical writing easier to comprehend than Korean text. As Oranckay has pointed out, the problem may lie with poor writing.

I did some googling and found that South Korean school children scored just behind Finnish students in an OECD survey on literacy: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t.....400147.ece

In another survey on adult literacy, it was noted that younger Swiss had higher literacy than middle-aged Swiss. The difference was atributed to a “use it or lose it” decline in reading skills due to lack of regular reading of complex material.

I suspect if Korean students are not proficient readers, it’s not because they aren’t memorizing thousands of characters; rather, it is owing to inconsistent modeling of good writing and a lack of lifelong appreciation of reading for enjoyment.

There is an all-too-human tendency to think that complexity equals brilliance that may be at work here. Maybe you should translate Strunk & White into hanja-free Korean.

I strongly disagree with Antti if he means to imply that the potential confusion that can come with having several hanja-based words that are the same pronunciation has much if anything to do with the problem described in the OECD article.

I’m happy to stand corrected here. I have formed my hunch of the issue from the few comments I remember reading about the OECD survey (and also from my wife’s comments about seeing Korean-language official formulae after living 20 years away from Korea).