L302 – Korean Language

Since the Korean wave in the early 2000s, the number of Korean language learners has spiked. Korean dramas now can be readily watched from local television as compared to 10 years ago, in order to cater for the increasing Korean-enthusiast and Korean drama fans. Mega productions like Jewel in the Palace (Da Chang Jin) that gained huge popularity worldwide, brought attention to the Korean culture and motivated many to study the language.



Korean language is classified as an Altaic language, which includes the Turkic, Mongolic and Japonic language families. However it may be also classified as a language isolate, which is defined as a natural language that is not descended from an ancestor common with any other languages. Korean is the most vibrant language isolate in the world today.



Though Korean is not related to Chinese, it has borrowed Chinese characters (Hanja) heavily. The use of Hanja was more common in the past. Today, Hanja is still taught in South Korean schools but North Korea has already abolished it decades ago, so as to eliminate Chinese culture influences.



Nowadays the Korean writing system uses mainly Hangul, that consists of phonological characters where each small group of stokes represents a certain sound (vowel or consonant). The strokes are then grouped together to form a single character which reflects its own pronunciation. This implies that you may know how to pronounce the characters but not know its meaning.



There are mainly 3 types of vocabulary in Korean. One native, one borrowed from Chinese and one borrowed from other foreign languages like English. South Korea uses lots of Western and Sino-borrowed words whereas North Korea prefers native Korean words.

Korean is an agglutinative language, where words are formed by combining single elementary meaningful characters. As such, words like verbs are easily modified (eg. into past tense) simply by adding a suffix. The sentence structure is subject-object-verb, which is significantly different from that of English and Chinese (subject-verb-object). This may pose difficulties to native English or Chinese learners.

Korean speech also includes honorifics, a characteristic which is absent from English and Chinese. Depending on the status of the speaker and listener, the speech style may change to reflect the other party’s superiority, or own inferiority.

North and South Korean do differ in their pronunciation, spelling, grammar and vocabulary, though they may look very similar. Most Korean learners are studying the South Korean version.

There is an international test, Korean Language Proficiency Test (KLPT), which measures the language ability of non-native Korean, whether they are proficient enough to live or work in Korea.