re: #247 ObserverArt

I know nothing about Asian languages. Are Chinese and Korean languages related or different from each other? Are there similarities?

Japanese and Korean are grammatically similar and both quite different from Chinese. In order to demonstrate independence (and perhaps to facilitate literacy) both North and South Korea have stopped using Chinese characters for the most part (though I suspect that academically-inclined students have to study classical Chinese, at least in the south—otherwise they won’t be able to read their own history in primary sources, mostly written in Chinese over the centuries.