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.