3/12    To the guy I was having the discussing about Chinese Characters
        in Korea with:
          I talked to my wife, and she told me that for a short time
        in the early 80's, Chinese Characters were not taught in
        middle and high school and there was no chinese literature course.
        That may have been the ban your friend was referring to.
        One other point about Koreas not being able to understand classic
        lit. Before the korean writing system was developed in the 1500s
        they used a wierd system called Naboo that was all chinese
        characters but some were meant to be read as their chinese meaning
        and some as their Korean pronuciation (to spell a Korean word).
        The exact meaning of passages in these writings cannot be clearly
        ascertained by anyone anymore.  (1 word being read 2 diffrent ways
        could have 2 different yet vaild meanings.)
        \_ ha ha losers... the Japanese have a system where every Chinese
           character has at LEAST 2 readings and sometimes more than 2
           meanings
        \_ Strange... I am a Chinese and I don't read a word of Korean, but
           when I was reading some of the ancient Korean text around 1600 or
           so, I sware I was able to read 70% of the text and actually
           understand what they are saying.  The text I read was the passage
           written by (or behave of) King Sejong, explaining inventing
           Hangul jamo as a way to enhance literacy among the common people.
                                        -kngharv
           \_ Not all anchient writings were like this.  There were also
              documents written in plain ol' chinese.  But actually
              my wife seems to think that's written all in actual
              phonetic Korean.  Maybe it was a translation?
              \_ I know what I am reading, and I am literate enough to
                 tell the differences between Chinese text and some foreign
                 text with whole bunch Chinese characters in it.  -kngharv
              \_ Korean scholars were all bilingual until pretty recently.
                 Actually Korean imported Chinese culture (confucianism and
                 Chinese characters) long before they developed their own
                 writing system (which I think happened during the Monloglian
                 occupation).  And that writing system was used exclusively
                 for the peasant and lower class while scholars used classic
                 Chinese for docuument and literature until last century.
                 \_ is that true that most of the official document in Korean
                    imperial court are written in Chinese characters?