To add, Korean as a language existed long before hangul. There was a writing system where they used Chinese characters to encode the words semantically. Like ho

To add, Korean as a language existed long before hangul. There was a writing system where they used Chinese characters to encode the words semantically. Like how modern Korean still uses Chinese words in the "backend" so to speak, and the old system was exactly how Japanese Kanji works, you write the Chinese character and you read it with the Korean pronunciation (unwritten, and you had to memorize it, just like Japanese--difficult!) Now the kicker is, they encoded pure-Korean words using stand-ins using Chinese. Particles would be written in Chinese with ridiculously complex rules, and pure Korean words were written phonetically in Chinese, with the pronunciation of the Chinese characters would be "close enough" to the pronunciation of the Korean word. It was a horrendous system which is why hangul was made (like the yangban nobles literally needed full time learning all day for like a decade to master it, and the literacy test to get into high status government jobs was literally just to write a few essays) The first few lines of 훈민정음 (basically a declaration that hangul is a thing we made, please use it) starts off with "the language of our land is different to that of the chinese and our writing system is not compatible. For that reason the uneducated subjects of the kingdom have trouble accomplishing their desires. So I (king sejong) find pity in this so I have created a new system of 28 characters, and would like everyone to practice it daily so that people can use it comfortably"