Sino-Korean vocabulary
Today, South Koreans write using a mix of hangul (the native Korean alphabet) and hanja 漢子 (the Korean version of Chinese characters), although they write using the latter far less than Chinese and Japanese do. Since Chinese words often sound similar to each other even in Chinese, they also became homophones when they came into Korean, but since Korean lacks tones, they sound even more alike in Korean. South Koreans usually write only in hangul, but sometimes when a word has many homophones and the meaning of the word is unclear from context, Koreans sometimes write the word in hanja so that there is no confusion between words. For example, since the Korean word sudo (hanja: 수도) has many homophones and can have meanings like "spiritual discipline", "prisoner", "city of water, i.e. Venice or Suzhou", "paddy rice", "drain/rivers/path of surface water", "tunnel", or "capital city", so to avoid confusion about what sudo means, these words can be written by their hanja, which are 修道, 囚徒, 水都, 水稻, 水道, 隧道, and 首都. However, Koreans almost never write native Korean words in hanja. For example, native Korean words like Hananim (hangul: 하나님, hanja: 神, meaning: God), mul (hangul: 물, hanja: 水, meaning: water), mal (hangul: 말, hanja: 馬, meaning: horse), nara (hangul: 나라, hanja: 國, country), and saram (hangul: 사람, hanja: 人, meaning: person) will almost always be written in hangul, even though many of them can be written in hanja. This is different from Japanese, which often writes Chinese characters to represent both native Japanese words and Chinese loanwords.