Chinese characters, properly learned and used, help Korean reading. To be sure, learning Hancha costs time and effort, but this cost is not high; it can be further reduced by rationalizing and streamlining Hancha and Hancha use.
First, outmoded Sino-Korean words and idioms should not be used. When one looks at HanchaHan'gul mixed texts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one is struck by the heavy proportion of Hancha. For example, in a randomly chosen paragraph from Observations on a Journey to the West (Soeyu Kyoenmun) by Yu Kil-chun published in 1895, out of 158 graphs 90 are Hancha and 68 are Han'gul. Some S-K words in Hancha are old-fashioned or literary and have been replaced by native or colloquial words: yoe ('I') by na and pinch'oekhada by mullich'ida ('push aside'); the Hancha for pin is not in the list of 2,600 common Hancha.
Secondly, the number of Hancha used and learned should be judiciously limited. In S. Korea this number is at present only 1,800 (out of a possible 50,000). (For word processing, the Korean Industrial Standard specified 4,888 frequent Hancha in the base set.) In N. Korea 3,000 Hancha are taught in secondary and post-secondary schools, but as the Hancha learned do not appear in ordinary reading materials, they are easily forgotten. So, N. Koreans experience only the labor, but not the fruits, of learning a large number of complex Hancha. It would be far more sensible to learn about 1,500 Hancha and use them constantly than to learn twice as many Hancha only to forget them because of non-use.
Thirdly, overly complex Hancha--those with more than, say, 21 strokes--should
be simplified, preferably in coordination with similar simplifications in
Japanese and Chinese.
Remember that Chinese characters have to be complex only in order to make their huge numbers discriminable from one another. When the number of Hancha is limited to only 1,500, there is no need for any of them to be exceedingly complex. So the official Hancha should not include the extremely complex characters, which tend to represent uncommon or esoteric and infrequent concepts, anyway. ...
In a reader-friendly text, different types of word are written in their own appropriate script--Han'gul for native words, Hancha for some S-K items, Arabic numerals for numbers and calculations, English letters for well-known acronyms and abbreviations (e.g., apt for apartment; KBS for the Korean Broadcasting System)--so that they can be visually differentiated to help silent readers allocate their mental resources efficiently. A Korean address using all these different scripts is far easier to read than one using only Han'gul.
To conclude, Hancha are useful, even essential, for S-K words and are worth keeping. They not only should be taught at all levels of schools but also should be used widely, consistently, and judiciously in everyday reading materials. The use of Hancha, Arabic numerals, occasional English letters, and other symbols in no way implies that Han'gul is deficient; rather it implies that a text is easier to read when it contains a variety of scripts to differentiate different types of items. The Society of Han'gul Studies declared: "The assertion of restricted use of Hancha is the greatest enemy of the exclusive use of Han'gul." On the contrary, the exclusive use of Han'gul is an enemy of efficient reading, while the restricted use of Hancha is its friend.
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