The korean writing system ??

Question

I now that the korean writing system was invented so that people didn't have to learn the thousands of Chinese characters, but does that mean that no chinese characters are used, or are they kind of combined - like hiragana and kanji?

Answer 1

You can write the Korean language entirely in Hangul (Korean characters), but there are a lot of homophones that are better clarified with the Chinese characters. In novels you'll mostly find Hangul with an occasional Chinese character in parentheses where it's ambiguous. Newspapers, though, make extensive use of Chinese characters. As a non-native speaker I could never read a Korean newspaper.