The situation with English is similar to the situation with Korean being written with hanja, although not as severe.  We&#x27;re using the Latin alphabet, which was designed for a language with many fewer phonemes, and we&#x27;re using it in a quasi-ideographic way in which spellings reflect etymology as much as they do pronunciation.  So even though we have between thirteen and twenty vowels, depending on how you count, we attempt to represent them all with only six graphemes — and irregularly at that.