What does 한포자 mean?

 ANSWER: Someone who has given up on learning Chinese characters

한포자 seems to be an abbreviation of the Korean phrase 한자 공부를 포기한 자 (사람), which can translate as "someone who had given up on studying Chinese characters." I saw the phrase in the video below.

In the video, the narrator suggests that there are a lot of 한포자s in Korea and that they are at a disadvantage in Korean society since about 70 percent of Korean words are Sino-Korean words, which means the words are based on Chinese characters. That also means that foreigners trying to learn Korean are at a disadvantage if they don't know Chinese characters.

The video suggests that the reason many Koreans give up on learning Chinese characters is that many of the methods used to teach them are outdated. During the Joseon Kingdom, for example, many Koreans started their Chinese-character education by memorizing the "Thousand-Character Poem" (천자문 千字文), which introduces 1,000 characters, but many of the characters used in the poem are really too complicated for beginning students. The key to learning complicated characters is to first learn the components of those complicated characters. For example, it makes more sense to first learn the characters for the "sun" (日 일) and the "moon" (月 월) before learning the character for "bright" (明 명).

I am posting the video not because I agree 100 percent with the message but because I liked the way the message was presented. The book the video seems to be promoting looks kind of interesting, but I do not know enough about it to recommend it.

Anyway, don't be a 한포자.