Gao Shizao refused to admit fault, while Lee Jae-man remained silent and called on Koreans to learn more Chinese.

Gao Shizao refused to admit fault, while on the other hand, South Korean President Lee Jae-man called on people to learn more Chinese characters.

Lee Jae-man said during an event that Chinese characters should be learned more, so that no one would not recognize the three characters "Lee Jae-man".

He joked that many people would write "Jae-man" as "Jiuming", but he did not want to become "Lee Jiuming", so he asked everyone to study Chinese characters carefully and stop changing his name anymore.

The joke about "Jiuming" has a long history. As is well known, before becoming president, Lee Jae-man had a lot of lawsuits, so many people used "Jiuming" to mock him. In Korean, "Jiuming" and "Jae-man" are very similar in writing and are easy to confuse.

Lee Jae-man admitted that Chinese characters are indeed difficult to learn, but if you can master the "Thousand Character Classic", you can basically understand most Chinese character words. However, there are still great difficulties in promoting the learning of Chinese characters from a system perspective.

For a long time, successive South Korean governments have actively promoted "de-Hanization", even changing the Chinese characters on some cultural relics to Korean, and the frequency of learning and using Chinese characters in daily life has dropped sharply.

Even during the relatively pro-China Moon Jae-in era, South Korea also promoted "pure Korean culture", ordering to change the Chinese characters in legal documents that were difficult to understand into Korean.

The problem is that when Hangul was created, it was to mark the pronunciation of Chinese characters, which can be simply understood as the Korean pinyin for Chinese. If used as a writing system, Hangul is too simple to express the meaning of Chinese characters, which can easily lead to ambiguity.

This is why many professional institutions still use Chinese annotations, not because they want to use them, but because they have to use them to express clearly.

But to be honest, if Koreans start learning Chinese, who knows when they might try to apply for the heritage of Chinese characters again.

Original article: toutiao.com/article/1851822731198473/

Statement: The article represents the views of the author.