Yep, having collected the majority of those assignments from my writing class students, it turns out that more than one group decided to write about how Hangeul is superior to English. When you ask people to compare and contrast something, it’s interesting how some immediately feel the need to prove that whatever they feel is theirs is absolutely superior.
The claims made are that Hangeul is easier to learn. Well, yes, I have to give it that. It’s generally pretty easy to learn to spell Korean words by ear. There are a few difficult liasons, and some of those double consonants take a while to start hearing, and the a-e/eo-e vowel is basically indistinguishable by hearing, but yeah, all in all, spelling in Korean is easier than spelling in English. Why? Well, English language words tend to contain (or hint at) their etymology. You have words and roots borrowed from French, Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, and many more languages. While learning to spell in English can therefore be a big pain, it may help somewhat with advanced learners, who start to catch the etymological links between words. Of course, this exists in Korean, too, but it’s not a facet of the spelling per se. The tradeoff here is that spelling is a royal pain in English, but that etymology presents itself a little more clearly. On the other hand, in Korean, since everything’s spelled using a more semi-phonetical system, it’s much easier to learn how to spell in Korean, but a foreign learner might need to learn Hanja (Chinese characters) in order to figure out which words are Korean and which are Chinese-rooted.
Notice how I’m contrasting the two languages? Some of my students seem to have missed that this was the point of the exercise. When I see essay titles like, “The Superiority of Hangeul”, I have to shake my head. It’s like a knee-jerk response, this, “Mine is better, mine is the best!”
Other “interesting” arguments: It will be easier to create a voice-recognition system because there are no homonyms in Korean. (So, then, does