1) The reason we cannot have our language and culture in full bloom without knowing Chinese characters is that the Korean language has been formed in a specific geographical configuration and in a special historical and cultural background. 2) If only we know a small amount of the basic Chinese characters we use in our day-to-day use of our language, we can utilize the knowledge with great convenience for our lifetime. In this respect, it is only imperative that we support the policy of simultaneous use of Chinese characters. 3) Chinese is an ideographic language which consists of letters with their own meaning. Therefore, the Chinese transcription `Han-kuk` meaning Korea may well carry the meaning over to the person of any Far-East nations who knows Chinese characters even if he or she doesn`t know how to pronounce the word correctly in the original pronunciation. 4) Chinese characters, even though they compose the very nucleus of the vocabulary of our language, are being less and less studies these days, so it is only appropriate that we take the option of using Chinese characters simultaneously. 5) Given the particularity of our linguistic history or the pragmatic usefulness of its nature, the simultaneous use of Chinese characters is a mandatory event, so that the government documents, traffic signs, and the national registration cards should use Chinese characters simultaneously as a positive, relevant education starts at elementary school levels. 6) Gollege students barely read Chinese words like `Hon-kuk` or `Chol-hak` and are not able to refer to the books of the professors and don`t understand the lecture when the Chinese words are written on the blackboard so they avoid taking such courses. This indicates that our Chinese education up to now is a sore failure. 7) Considering that the structure of Korean morphology consists of both Korean and Chinese in its arbitrary way, the linguistic awareness of Korean plus Chinese could be a desirable view of our modern language. Therefore, the need of simultaneous use of Chinese characters on government documents and traffic signs should be acutely felt to smoothen our life of written communication, and by means of realizing that Chinese education can be very fruitful, we should plan to implement it early at elementary school levels. 8) In the governmental dimension the policy of language education should be renovated to the extent that the curriculum of elementary school Chinese will result and that the textbooks will be developed based on the theory of text, along with the improvement of teachers` ability to teach the subject concerned. So if we run the course in a regular curriculum beginning with the first grade the literacy of the whole program will surely jump up to meet the goals of our expectation.

• 鄭愚相(서울敎大) | Jeong, Woo-sang