How many Koreans these days have memorized the "Thousand Character Classic" (千字文 천자문)?

ANSWER: Probably not too many, but many used to memorize it, or at least try to.

It is not known for sure when the "Thousand Character Classic" (千字文 천자문) was written, but it is believed to have been written at least 1,500 years ago. It was written as a text to teach reading in China, which means it was written to teach people to read Chinese writing. It was written as a poem that students were often expected to memorize. To help remember the poem, it was often sung. All the 1,000 characters of the poem are different. In other words, no character (word) is used more than once.

My ex-Korean wife once told me that her uncle had taught her to read the "Thousand Character Classic" when she was a little girl. Her father and uncles were supposedly "yangban" from the Kumgang Mountain (금강산) region before the Korean war. It may have been a chore for her at time, but she remembered being excited one day when she rode the tram in downtown Seoul with her uncle and recognized on the shop signboards many of the Chinese characters they had been studying. The trams stopped operating in Seoul in 1968.

The following video is of a Korean man and his Korean female pupil singing the "Thousand Character Classic," one version with the character pronunciations and their individual meanings (훈독) and one version with just the pronunciations (음독). The man also translates each 4-character sentence into Korean (해설). If you would like an English translation with Chinese pronunciations, there is one I really like HERE.