Actually, except for the very old most Koreans know pretty much no hanja beyond really basic ones like 大. I always think this argument is ridiculous. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese people have managed to speak their respective languages (or ancestors of them) for thousands of years without being excessively troubled by those pesky homophones despite the fact that until the 20th Century only a small minority of them were literate.

Very much this. Some more thoughts:

* Standard Mandarin has a surprisingly small number of distinct syllables, namely about 400 when tones are ignored, and 1300 with tones. English has about 7000 to 15000. So, homophones are a bit more of a problem in Mandarin than in English.

* English disambiguates some homophones in writing (where/were, there/their/they're, and so on), though as less literate people increasingly demonstrate, one can communicate reasonably well without these disambiguations.

* Spanish has an extremely close correspondence between what is written and what is said, and only disambiguates a very few words (typically question words) with an accent, and the writing system works just fine.

* Given that spoken Mandarin works, and disambiguation of homophones in alphabetic languages is only sometimes done, I am personally convinced that some sort of alphabetic writing for Mandarin is absolutely feasible. That might be Pinyin or Bopomofo or some variation thereof.

* Personally, I find the Chinese script very beautiful, but a colossal waste of time (think of the billion of poor kids that had to learn it).

* Would switching to some sort of alphabetic system cut people off of their cultural heritage? Maybe somewhat, but I'd argue it's mitigated by two things: a) Classical Chinese is in fact so remote from modern one that you have to study it anyways in depth, if you are into it. You could still do that, if you are into it. b) Nearly nobody speaks Latin anymore in the West, the horror. Are we cut off of our cultural heritage? Well, somewhat, but there are translations, and if you're really into it, you can still go and learn it, see a).

Great resources on these issues, btw:

* "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy", John DeFrancis

* "Asia's Orthographic Dilemma", Wm. C. Hannas, extract available here http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html

* Pinyin Info, http://www.pinyin.info/

* Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ , in particular Victor Mair's posts

Yeah I'm a fan of all the resources you mentioned. It's hard to talk about this without people accusing you of just being too lazy to learn, never mind that I've already put in the time to learn the Japanese writing system.

One way to disambiguate in Korean, especially North Korea, guess what, is simply using another word to replace the ambiguous one. Why keeping using a word that is causing confusion anyway?

It's a chicken-and-egg problem. When most people write in "phonetic" script, people stop using ambiguous words that sound alike, so these words fade away, which further strengthens the adoption of phonetic script.

If everyone around you uses Chinese characters, there's little incentive to avoid homophones, so they will remain a part of literary language, reinforcing the use of Chinese characters.

That is exactly what I meant. The theory that w/o Chinese, makes languages like Korean/Vietnamese 'worse', is a myth constructed by some sino-centrists. The decision to keep or deprecate Chinese characters is political, but people find their way to adapt and evolve with the new language.

Very true.

And indeed, Korean words that come from Chinese (about half) have a much higher ratio of homophones than in the native Korean part.