#2 Cultural Post: Target Language's Writing System

Second Cultural Post:  Target Language's Writing System

Historically, Koreans used the Hanja which were characters borrowed from the Chinese alphabet. At the time however, only people from wealthy families were educated and were able to use the writing system. The system was too complex to learn for peasants and other Koreans who could not afford to go to school. To address this issue, the emperor of the time King Sejong decided to create a new, simple writing system called Hangul. Each of the letters in Hangul is a shape that is based on the configuration of the articulators in the making of the sound. Although this is more then the original version of Hangul, there has been changes made since Hangul was first created.Even if there are some different dialects depending on the regions you are, they are all based on this system. The system was very efficient and in a very short period of time the illiteracy rate of Korea fell drastically, in fact at the time the emperor said that the system was so easy to learn that "a wise man could master it in on day and an illiterate in a week". Hangul is part of the altaic languages and is unrelated to Chinese and similar but distinct from Japanese.

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