Actually Bridgman, Koran and Japanese have absolutely nothing in common. Although Korean (root words) have commonality with Chinese, about 600 years ago, a Korean king said "screw this...Chinese is too hard!" So he created a new language for Koreans (thank goodness for Koreans, the language is phonetic and easy to learn).
Agreed. I found the phonetic language a life-saver... made it much easier to get around with my relatively poor language skills. The fact that some travel-related words were borrowed from English and translated directly to phonetics didn't hurt either, eg Da-Xi (taxi) and Tsa-U-Na (sauna). My name didn't translate so well to phonetics though, ended up something like Bu-Li-Gi-Man
That said, my understanding was that the phonetics were used to represent the Mandarin pronounciation and that Chinese characters were still mixed in for cases where multiple words had the same pronunciation. All of the newspapers, for example, contained mostly Korean phonetic text but perhaps 10-15% of the words were represented by Chinese characters (for the cases where phonetics were not sufficient to uniquely identify a word).
The connection with Japanese is indirect, in the sense that it only exists as a consequence of some common characters used between Chinese and one of the Japanese writing variants. There is no direct connection between Korean and Japanese, just the fact that since Korean writing "escapes" to Chinese characters and that the same characters are used in one of the Japanese variants (with the same meanings, I'm told), that opens a possible communication path between "Koreans who know a lot of Chinese characters" and "Japanese who know the script variant that uses the same Chinese characters" and that path was heavily used by engineering folks at the time (mid-80s). Or something like that
I really loved my time in Korea.
