Korean is essentially a phonetic language now. Japanese is half, with only the Kanji part arguably derived from pictograms. Even Chinese writing is not really a

Korean is essentially a phonetic language now. Japanese is half, with only the Kanji part arguably derived from pictograms. Even Chinese writing is not really a pictogram system for the reasons outlined in the article. In practice, the majority of characters are constructed with a radical plus a phonetic component. Also, by the way, the vast majority (if not all) "Asian" languages are phonetic unless they have Chinese influence.