This dialogue examines how linguistic structure and reading culture influence abstract thinking and academic standards in Korea.
It explores the challenges of Hangul-only usage, declining reading habits, and dependence on overseas study, offering a comparative reflection on intellectual foundations in East Asia.

2019-01-28
Scientific or philosophical works can hardly be properly read by anyone who has not received fairly specialized education.
A chapter titled “Although Korea is a harsh credential-based society, its domestic academic level is extremely low, so in the end people must study abroad and learn English,” which I posted on 2017-07-03, entered goo’s best50 yesterday.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The people are becoming foolish.
Hyakuta.
In Japanese terms, it would be like everything being written entirely in hiragana.
Books like that would be impossible to read.
Extremely inconvenient.
Go.
About seventy percent of Korean vocabulary consists of Sino-Korean words derived from Chinese characters.
Yet they are expressed only in Hangul, which is a phonetic script.
So, just as Mr. Hyakuta said, it is like writing Japanese entirely in hiragana.
Hyakuta.
That would create an enormous number of homonyms.
Go.
Exactly.
For example, there are 150 Chinese characters pronounced “chon” in Korean, and about 2,500 compound words using them.
Words such as electricity, electric machinery, war chronicles, war machines, previous term, entire term, weather, biography, turning point all share the same pronunciation.
“Prehistory and war death,” “telephone and warfare,” “all subjects and war results and transformation,” and “family tradition and farm household and transfer” are also homonyms.
If one uses ideographic characters like kanji, even unfamiliar compounds are easier to grasp.
But with Hangul alone, that is not possible.
Therefore translating into Japanese becomes extremely difficult.
One must rely on subjective judgment, thinking perhaps this is the meaning.
Hyakuta.
Then sentences inevitably become simpler and simpler.
Go.
Yes.
At first there were attempts to replace difficult Sino-Korean compounds with simple native expressions.
For example, replacing “devoting oneself wholeheartedly” with “working hard to solve a problem.”
The same occurred in North Korea.
For instance, “flood” was replaced with “a lot of water overflowing.”
However most of these replacements failed to take root and disappeared.
Since most everyday vocabulary consists of Sino-Korean words, replacing everything is impossible.
Without using such compounds, expressions inevitably become childish, and understanding abstract concepts that cannot be paraphrased becomes increasingly difficult.
Hyakuta.
In short, complex sentences cannot be constructed.
The level of humanities and social sciences continues to decline.
In other words, the people are becoming foolish.
Ah, this too will probably be called hate speech.
Go.
No, what you say is correct.
In Korea, reading volume has decreased even more than in Japan, and among what is read, popular romance novels dominate.
Scientific and philosophical works can hardly be properly read except by those with fairly specialized education.
As a result, Koreans have become very weak at abstract thinking.
Although Korea is a harsh credential-based society, its domestic academic level is extremely low, so in the end people must study abroad and learn English in order to think and function.
That is the reality of Korea today.
Why then do institutions such as the Asahi Shimbun and Ritsumeikan University actively send employees and students there through internal study-abroad programs?