About Korea

Before the fifteenth century, North Korea did not have its own spoken and written language, and official documents were all written in Chinese. It was not until the reign of King Sejong that the Korean nation created its own script, which is a window-type script and a phonetic script. This kind of writing is very easy to learn and popularize. Now it seems that the United Nations’ highest award for eradicating illiteracy is called the King Sejong Award (roughly). However, this kind of phonetic writing has shortcomings. For example, in Chinese, "Yu" and "Liu" have the same pronunciation, and they look the same when written, so Chinese characters must be annotated. Moreover, after the creation of Hangul, Chinese characters are still widely used on the Korean Peninsula. According to records, after the liberation of North Korea, when Kim Il-sung returned to Pyongyang, 4 of the 16 welcome slogans were in Chinese. However, after the 1950s, both North and South Korea showed a strong centrifugal tendency towards Chinese culture. The Chinese characters that used to be seen everywhere in Korean writing disappeared under the pressure of nationalism (let’s put it this way).