Why Learn Korean?

A front-page story in today’s New York Times (paper edition) blew my mind. It reported how many young Americans are flocking to learn Korean.

The main attraction is South Korea’s vibrant youth culture, including K-Pop. But there may be other reasons to learn Korean. It could rewire your brain.

All written languages take one of two forms: alphabetic or pictographic. Alphabetic languages include all “Western” languages, as well as Arabic, Farsi (Persian), Hebrew, Russian, and Ukrainian, among others. Nearly all Western languages, including European and Scandinavian languages, use variants of the Roman alphabet. The primary pictographic written languages are Chinese and the Eastern languages that use Chinese characters, at least in part, including Japanese and Korean.

There’s a huge gulf in complexity between the alphabetic languages and the Chinese-derived pictographic languages. In English, for example, the most complex letters—E, M and W—have four strokes. There are only 26 letters in the alphabet. In Chinese, the most complex characters can have up to 24 strokes, and a scholar or educated professional must know about 3,000 of them. So as a rough measure of the complexity of the written language, multiply the number of strokes in the most complex characters by the number of characters, thus:

English: 4 x 26 = 104
Chinese (“hantsu"): 24 x 3,000 = 72,000
“Complexity” ratio: 692
The time needed to learn to read and write reflects this complexity ratio. In the US and UK, children learn the entire alphabet and how to use it to write and pronounce words by age seven. (They may not be able to remember or understand all the words they see, but they can write and read any word in the language.) In China, children do not achieve complete mastery of all the hantsu required to be an educated adult until mid adolescence, at least seven years later. The same is true of children learning hantsu in Japan, which has its own kanji, or slightly simplified versions of the Chinese characters.

Enter hangul. That’s Korea’s unique written alphabet.

With the help of a specially assigned crew of experts, Korea’s King Sejong developed hangul from scratch, over the course of three years during the fifteenth century. Since then, it has slowly and steadily replaced Chinese hantsu in Korea. According to Chat GPT, “By the 1980s, most newspapers, books, and official documents were Hangul-only, with occasional Hanja [the Korean word for Hantsu] in parentheses.”

As Chat CPT confirms, hangul is a unique written language in three respects. First, it didn’t just evolve over centuries or millennia, as did most written languages. It was deliberately created by King Sejong and his committee of experts over a three-year period. Second, it was designed to reflect and exploit the spoken Korean language as it had already developed at that time; it did not co-evolve with spoken Korean.

Finally, as a consequence of the foregoing, Hangul has a unique two-dimensional character. The syllables are each written left to right and then stacked above each other in a two-dimensional array. To the untrained eye, the result can look like Chinese characters, but it’s not. Each two-dimensional block is an alphabetical word with syllables stacked vertically.

Does that compact, two-dimensional structure have an advantage over the linear (right to left or left to right) alphabetic writing of Europe and the Middle East? That’s my hypothesis. Our eyes and brains did not evolve to see in long, straight lines. When the saber-toothed tiger leapt out of the bush to attack us, we had to see the whole three dimensional picture: not just the tiger, but where it was coming from and how far we were from a tree, cliff or river that might offer safety. Those who couldn’t see the big picture didn’t survive to pass on their genes.

Does anything else suggest that this hypothesized cognitive advantage might be real? Well, consider the following. North Korea is a basket case while it suffers under the most stultifying dictatorship on our planet. Meanwhile, South Korea has one of the world’s most productive and innovating engineering economies. I personally have a Kia electric car (EV6) and an LG laundry (clothes washer and electric dryer), all acquired in the last two years. My Samsung Chromebook is a bit older, but its reliability (along with Google’s solid software) has made me resolve to sell my newer Macbook Air on Craigslist. (I’m typing on the Samsung Chromebook now.)

These Korean-made products are among the best engineered products that I own and that I’ve ever owned. Yet South Korea’s population is less than 52 million, less than one-half of Japan’s and one-sixth of ours.

How did this pipsqueak of a nation rise to become an engineering giant, eclipsing our own country (which now doesn’t make much of note besides airplanes, gas and diesel vehicles and trouble), as well as Japan, the UK and Europe? And how did Korea manage that feat from a standing start of utter devastation after the Korean war, which ended a mere 71 years ago? Could there be something underappreciated in King Sejong’s work?

And how about South Korea’s recent affirmation of democracy? Its erstwhile president, Yoon Suk Yeol, sought to become a despot by declaring martial law. He was promptly impeached and removed as president. He’s now awaiting trial on related criminal charges. No Roberts-conjured legal immunity for him, or for any South Korean chief executive!

So while K-pop may be the immediate driver, there are lots of reasons to respect, honor and emulate South Koreans, their language and their society. Of all our wars since the Big One, the one that liberated South Korea and helped make it what it is today appears to have been the most justified and productive.

In fact, South Korea is looking more and more like a good place to live if you want a thriving economy, good jobs, and a stable democracy. Unlike China, it doesn’t require you to learn 3,000 Hanja just to be able to read and write. And kimchi is just spicy, healthy icing on the cake.