Plus, If you don't mind, I'd like to add on youtoge's reply as well. Before Han-gul, Korean own character, invented by a king named Seh-jong about 600 years ago, Korean had used Chinese character for writing everything down even though the languages in oral between two contries was totally different at that times as well. Korean couldn't help borrowing Chinese character which was an ideogram, only understood by educated the nobility. That's the reason why the king decided to invented a phonogram, Hangul and why there are still many Chinese-origin words(i'd like to find out better expression for that 'cause that kind of word is not orginated from Chinese culture or something. Sorry, that's because of my lack of English. I'll use that expression in here just for convenience's sake) in Korean now. These days, we write down the chinese-origin words both in Chinese(at newspaper or some official old paper)and Korean chracter but it has totally different pronounciation, and we don't use Chinese charcters as whole sentence. Specially young people cant' recognize the chinese chracter except several very easy one, even if it is a chinease-origined Korean word. For example, a word for "tree", it is 木 in Chinese charaters, pronounced like "mu"( i've just looked for the dic. so, Koreans have no idea for chinese language!) Korean also understand that it means tree, we can just read it like, "mok"-"목" , or we can also use our own language and character like, "namoo"-"나무". For the meaning of "tree", we just use "namoo"나무, we do not use "mok"목, but we combine"mok"목 to several words containing the meaning of tree, such as "carpenter" or "woodwork" etc, and that is the so-called chinese origin words. Its pronounciation is still different with Chinese though.

Hi, I'm a native Korean and would like to answer your question. Korean is just a separated language as you've already known. All Koreans just use Korean with our own language and character and we can't read or speak Japanese or Chinese without studying them, same as Westerners. Speaking of English, more people in Korea can understand English better than Japanese or Chinese as young people in Korea are just eager to learn English from elementary school. Even though most people have some difficulty in speaking English as we usually tend to concerntrate in grammar,reading and voca, it is much more easier to talk with English in Korea better than Chinese and Japanease. Hope it's a certain answer for you. bye

@youtogo, I do not really understand you. I mean words that are of Chinese origin but are Koreanized. I do not mean characters, not the writing system.(??) It's what I read somewhere but, I do not know Chinese, so I have no idea whether a Korean word could be of Chinese origin.. For example in Dutch we use the word 'computer', which is of English origin. Or 'plafond' which has French origin. Not exactly the same, pronounced differently, but they come from another language.

There are many sino-borrowed words in Korean? if you talking about chinese character, you are misinformed. You didn't learn Korean, and I do. So I say, chinese character is not chinese. Japan, Korea, China is chinese character cultural area. It is a common language. Just only China use that common language for their usual language among three countries.

Thanks Michelle! It confirms my presumption. Well if I know Korean it is what they call a nice niche in the language skill job market.