I really like the Korean writing system. It's very cool. Take the 1-4 sounds that make up a syllable, arrange them into the syllable template, and you have a single character that represents that syllable. It's pretty slick, space-efficient, phonetic, and full of yummy goodness.
Then, just to mess with people, optionally throw in thousands of Chinese characters.
Meanwhile over in Korean, the writing system was designed from scratch to be very simple (I'm led to believe - I don't know any Korean)