| Disclaimer: I'm a Korean native speaker. It is interesting to see a perspective of someone who seems to have studied multiple languages. I think it would be useful to clarify what is meant by "writing system". The term may refer to the alphabet or the orthography of a language. (or other things that's out of the scope here) In the context of "Hangul hype", what is being discussed is usually about the alphabet, or, at least that is how I understand it. I do think Hangul as an alphabet is pretty intuitive and is modularized into components that compose well. On the other hand, Korean orthography doesn't really seem to be the easiest to learn and the complexity has bled into writing and pronouncing Hangul, as in written Korean. I don't have experience with languages other than English to compare with, but if someone says Korean orthography is in the middle of the camp I'd buy that. > Korean as a language cares more about aspiration than voicing resulting in, for a western ear, very minor differences that are explicitly expressed in the writing system and very big differences that are implied That's a really interesting point. I think it has something to do with pronunciation more than a writing system. For example I can't disambiguate the pronunciation of "밥" from that of the last syllable in "보리밥". I've been told they're different. |