Functional Literacy in Korea
Hunjangûi karûch'im's Antti Leppäsen reports the following today in Koreans' reading comprehension of Korean:

OECD has surveyed the capacity for actual reading comprehension in its member states, and it has turned out that Korea has gotten the lowest scores, that is Koreans have the lowest understanding of official and technical texts among the OECD countries.

When I reported this news to my wife, she countered, "That's because Korean is difficult." In reality, she's right; Mr. Leppäsen does an excellent job of explaining why this is the case:

I'm not really surprised at all about this, thinking of how non-lucid (?) official, formal written Korean can be, and how opaque for example all kind of formular writing can be. I'm of course talking as a non-native speaker, but so the native speakers are in trouble as well. Or actually the formal language in those kind of Korean contexts isn't really native at all for many Koreans.

One part of this unfortunate phenomenon has got to do with the idea that the Chinese characters are not really needed to understand or to write the Korean language as it used in official contexts at the moment. Koreans' poor performance in understanding everyday pieces of formal texts shows how the Chinese character terminology becomes difficult to understand when written in the wonderful hangul. (Knowing Chinese characters helps in understanding also the pure-hangul texts - and I know it even with my shobby knowledge of hanja.)

This is the reason why for example my wife says Finnish-language official documents are much easier for her than Korean-language ones (in case she sometimes happens to see those), despite that the latter is her native (and much stronger) language.

Mrs. Leppäsen's comments remind me of something many Korean Christians have told me: it is easier for them to read the Bible in English than in their native tongue! The reason is, as Mr. Leppäsen said, that formal Korean uses many words from Chinese, which may have many different meanings but identical pronunciation in Korean. A friend told me that for the longest time she thought the New Testament term "인자" (inja) meant "Nice Guy" (仁子) not "Son of Man" (人子).

I think the problem arises from the fact that out of nationalism Koreans have de-emphasized the teaching of Chinese characters. I spent my last three years of Korean language study focusing mainly on Chinese characters (about 1800 of them). I'll be the first to admit that my success in mastering Chinese characters was extremely limited at best, but I can attest to the fact that they are absolutely essential in understanding Korean.

[I have to confess also that I post this story for another reason: Koreans have on occasion bragged to me about their country's literacy rate, especially vis-à-vis that of the United States. The statistic I've heard more than once is that South Korea's literacy rate is 99%, while that of the United States is 50%. Of course, this is pure rubbish, and is probably based on different definitions of literacy.]