I recently learnt about twenty Chinese characters as they are used in writing Korean. In this context the characters are called hanja. Korean is rarely written using hanja today, and studying them is generally thought to be useful at very advanced levels of studying Korean. I decided to learn a few when the school principal gave me an elementary school hanja textbook recently, and though I’ve now stopped because learning Korean vocabulary is a much better use of my time, I learnt a few things that I want to write about.