What you often see quite frequently on Japanese internet forums and in some media is this kind of claim:
“It’s really inconvenient that Korean is written only in Hangul, just like it would be if Japanese were written only in hiragana and katakana without kanji. Because Korean dropped Chinese characters, it can’t properly distinguish homophones, so reading becomes harder and overall literacy suffers.”
What I don’t understand is: Korean does have homophones, but Hangul can represent a much wider range of phonetic distinctions than kana, so the number of actual homophones is relatively smaller. In the entire world, the only countries that still use logographic writing systems are Japan, Taiwan, and China. Most other languages—such as Arabic, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, English, Russian, Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, and so on—use purely phonetic scripts even though they also have homophones.
For example, a native English speaker can understand from context whether the word “capital” in a novel refers to uppercase letters, a capital city like Tokyo or Seoul, or financial capital. Likewise, when reading a sentence like “Kamen Rider is wearing a muffler around his neck,” no one interprets it as him wearing a car’s exhaust pipe instead of a scarf.
Even in countries like Korea—and even Vietnam, which abandoned Chinese characters long ago and uses the Latin alphabet—there are no particular problems with writing systems or language use. Most other languages are the same. So why do some Japanese people argue that “Koreans cannot distinguish homophones without Chinese characters, which lowers reading comprehension, so they must use kanji”?
And while learning Latin roots can be helpful for understanding English, most everyday English speakers are not required to learn Latin as a necessity, Even people who know Latin roots and etymology rarely know or use the ancient Latin alphabet as it was used in ancient Rome, rather than the modern alphabet.
For example, Turkey switched entirely to the Latin alphabet for writing Turkish after Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s reforms, and Egypt no longer uses ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. In that case, should they also be expected to use the scripts their ancestors used hundreds or even thousands of years ago in order to preserve tradition and language?