This article examines how the exclusive use of Hangul has eroded abstract thinking and academic rigor in South Korea. Despite an intense credential-driven society, the country’s intellectual foundations have weakened, forcing reliance on overseas study and English to sustain higher-level thought.

This essay explores the paradox of South Korea’s harsh credential-driven society and its strikingly low domestic academic standards.
By analyzing linguistic structure and educational practice, it argues that the exclusion of Chinese characters from Korean writing has severely weakened abstract thinking and scholarly depth.
As a result, higher intellectual work increasingly depends on overseas study and English-language education.
The article questions why Japanese institutions continue to send students and employees to Korea despite these structural limitations, highlighting a deeper disconnect between reputation and reality.

2017-07-03
Korea is a harsh credential-based society, yet its domestic academic level is so extremely low that, in the end, people have no choice but to study abroad and learn English in order to think.
This is a continuation of the previous chapter.
“The people are becoming foolish.”
百田尚樹
If it were written in Japanese entirely in hiragana, it would be unreadable.
It would be extraordinarily inconvenient.
呉善花
About seventy percent of Korean vocabulary consists of Sino-Korean words derived from Chinese characters.
Yet these are all written only in Hangul, which is a phonetic script.
So, just as Mr. Hyakuta said, it is like writing Japanese entirely in hiragana.
Hyakuta
That must result in an enormous number of homonyms.
Oh
Exactly.
For example, in Korean there are about 150 different Chinese characters pronounced “cheon,” and some 2,500 compound words using them.
Words such as electricity, electrical machinery, war record, turning point, first term, whole term, weather, biography, and opportunity are all pronounced the same.
“Prehistory and death in battle,” “telephone and war fire,” “all departments, battle results, and transformation,” and “family tradition, rice field family, and remarriage” are also homonyms.
With ideographic characters like kanji, even unfamiliar compounds are relatively easy to grasp, but with Hangul this is not possible.
That is why translation into Japanese is extraordinarily difficult.
One can only make subjective judgments about meaning.
Hyakuta
So the sentences inevitably become simpler and simpler.
Oh
Yes.
At first, there were attempts to replace difficult Sino-Korean words with simpler native expressions.
For example, “fushin” (deep concern) would be replaced with “trying hard to solve a problem.”
The same happened in North Korea, where “flood” was replaced with “a lot of water overflowing.”
However, most of these replacements failed to take root.
Since the majority of everyday vocabulary consists of Sino-Korean words, it is impossible to replace them all.
Without Sino-Korean 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 declines steadily.
In other words, the people become foolish.
Ah, I suppose this too will be called “hate speech.”
Oh
No, you are absolutely right.
In Korea, reading volume has declined even more sharply than in Japan.
Among what is read, popular romance novels dominate.
Scientific or philosophical works cannot be properly read except by those who have received highly specialized education.
As a result, Koreans have become extremely poor at abstract thinking.
Korea is a harsh credential society, yet its domestic academic level is so low that the current reality is that people must study abroad and learn English in order to think at all.
Why, then, do Asahi Shimbun and Ritsumeikan University so actively send employees and students to study in Korea under corporate study-abroad programs?