I don't know Korean, but Spanish is amazingly regular. Once you learn the 27 letters of the alphabet you can read anything. I'm not saying you can comprehend anything, but you can sound out all the words. It's not like English where you can't tell how to pronounce a word just by looking at it (for instance "though"). In Spanish you always know how to pronounce a word just by looking at it.

On top of that, Spanish feels like a pragmatic language: it foregoes French's formality and resistance to borrowed words (e.g., computadora versus ordinateur). It also helps that Spanish speakers tend to be forgiving of gender errors in the rare cases where the spelling misleads (mostly just masculine words that end in -a).

This is more of a split between Latin America and Spain (and the various other places that borrow language from them)

Latin America -> computadora

Spain -> ordenador

Huh. I didn't know that. Thank you for the correction!

hangul is probably my favorite writing system, but I wouldn't really consider it any simpler than an alphabet type system. Can't speak for abjads, though.

Also, converting spoken Korean into text can be tricky for non native speakers (e.g. 맛 is pronounced 'Mat' although the spelling would indicate 'Mas')

for the most part Korean still follows simple rules though. 맛 -> 'mat' only if it is followed by a consonant, so 맛는 -> matneun, whereas 맛있어요 -> masisseoyo.

Not like english do not have a whole lot of weird spellings (never mind that British english and American english spell things differently).

I disagree, because the Korean alphabet requires composition of glyphs

Arabic has some marks and different start/middle/end forms but it is simpler

The Korean alphabet can easily be learnt in a few hours.

It's an "artificial" alphabet, meaning that it wasn't born organically over hundreds of years but created by a group of koreans. It's very simple by design, as it was created to allow the general populace to write and read (until then they were using some kind of chinese dialect, too complicated for those in the working class).

Case in point: http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/20461267965/learn-t...

Source: my korean teacher back when I did a year of study in korea. So I might be fuzzy on some details.

Arabic and Korean both possess phonetic alphabets. If you define a glyph as a pictogram then you'd have to consider Arabic to be under the same umbrella.

>>Arabic [has] different start/middle/end forms [...]

As far as I'm aware, Korean doesn't have different characters (forms) for the same sound, and doesn't omit vowels in the same manner that written Arabic does sometimes.

However, in the grand scheme of things, China has invested too much culturally, traditionally and publicly to walk away from their (relatively recently) simplified writing system and language.

You are completely wrong on your first sentence. Hangul has fewer letters in the alphabet, fewer consonants, and virtually no different forms. It's also a phonetic language written as it's spoken more or less, unlike Arabic which leaves out vowels usually making it ambiguous far to often. Lets also not forget that there's many dialects of Arabic depending on region. Further, Arabic is often written in a script that makes it harder to read, especially from a distance, whereas Hangul is pretty unambiguous even with very small print.

(Reply biased a little based on my own experience reading both languages, but still should be pretty factually correct for most)

Bonus points that everything in Arabic is phoentic. Something is spelled like it sounds (unlike english) and there is little ambiguity.

Arabic is plenty ambiguous since it omits vowels.

little ambiguity? I beg to differ. no one writes with vowel marks in Arabic and the same word can be interpreted in many different ways without context. even with context but lacking vowel marks the same word can mean different things.