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As far as the use of Kanji (chinese characters) in Japanese, its a blessing and a curse. Learning to read and write them properly takes a hell of a long time. The upside to kanji is that they are fairly easy to recognize. There are many kanji that I know the meaning of, but can't write, or even pronounce. It's very nice if your going over a paper to yourself, you can just substitute its meaning in. This is very nice because Japanese's phonetic alphabet is only ~96 characters, so there are alot of homophones. The kanji let you know immediately the intended meaning of the word. Japanese is also written without space, so a sentence written with kanji makes it easier for to seperate the words.
I've never studied the Korean alphabet, but I have had it explained, and it is an improvement to the Japanese hiragana/katakana. Where as in hiragana "ka" would be written with one character, Korean combines a "k" and an "a" sound to form one character, meaning you can learn it in a much shorter time(although learning hiragana/katakana only took me one week).
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