Social media posts in South Korea have miscaptioned photos from a university lecture, falsely claiming they show a professor telling a Chinese student that Chinese characters are "too difficult" and should be replaced with the Korean writing system. The photos actually show a neuroscience professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology talking about the brain, not the Chinese or Korean languages. While Korea's writing system used to be written with Chinese characters, a phonetic alphabet invented in the 15th century called Hangul has since gained widespread usage.

"A Chinese international student angrily claiming to a professor that Hangul was made by China," reads a Korean-language post shared on March 4 on popular South Korean online forum Bobaedream.

The post shows photos of a woman it identifies as "Sarah Adele, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia."

Korean subtitles on the images purport to show an exchange between the professor and a Chinese student, who told her: "Korean characters were invented by China" and "Korean characters and Chinese characters are very similar. They also have the same grammatical structure."

The professor supposedly responded: "Chinese people, why don't you guys use Korean characters instead of Chinese characters? Chinese characters are too difficult for foreigners to learn. It seems like you guys like Korean characters. I don't get why you guys are still using Chinese characters."

China is home to...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiR2h0dHBzOi8vbmV3cy55YWhvby5jb20vdmlk...