Korean is the official language of both South Korea (Republic of Korea) and North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea).
South Korea has one official language: Korean, although Japanese, English and Mandarin are widely spoken and understood.
English is used in South Korea as a second language. It is taught in schools but the majority of the people do not speak if freely. This language has had a number of uses in the Korean community over the last century.
Korean is the main language, while English is the second most common language. Chinese is the third language spoken in South Korea, with over one million South Koreans speaking some form of Chinese. This is due to the influx of Chinese immigrants to South Korea and the popularity of Chinese culture.
Linguistically, Korean is unrelated to Chinese and is similar to, but distinct from Japanese. Early historical records indicate that at the dawn of the Christian era, two groups of languages were spoken in Manchuria and on the Korean Peninsula: the Northern or Puyo group and the southern or Han group.
Because Japanese and Korean have Chinese roots, there's a lot of similar vocabulary between these three languages. Linguists believe that around 60% of Korean words and 50% of Japanese words come from Chinese.
Chinese is the oldest of these three languages and is considered the oldest spoken language in the world. Experts claim that the Chinese language originated 3,000 years ago. As you might already know, hundreds of spoken dialects exist in China.
Korean shares some similarities with both the Japanese and Chinese languages. Korean is similar to Japanese in terms of grammar and sentence structure. They both also have their own unique writing systems that are fairly easy to learn.
The Korean language belongs to the Altaic language family. It is related to Turkish, Mongolian, and Manchu (a Chinese dialect). In terms of grammar, Korean is closest to Japanese. It also shares many words of Chinese origin.
The phonetic system, pronunciation and the grammatical structure of the two languages are all extremely different. There are many sounds in the English language that simply do not exist in the Korean language, and this causes a multitude of pronunciation difficulties for Korean learners of English.
The FSI puts Korean as a Category V language. Which means, it's one of the hardest languages to master. They estimate 2200 hours of study before you can reach fluency in Korean. Or 88 weeks of extremely intense study.
Further, the Koreans are more closely related to the Japanese and quite distant from the Chinese. The above evidence of the origin of Koreans fits well with the ethnohistoric account of the origin of Koreans and the Korean language. The minority Koreans in China also maintained their genetic identity.
It is spoken by almost everyone in the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). It is also spoken by around 1.9 million people in China, mostly in the North-East of the country.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Of these, Spanish and Italian are the easiest for native English speakers to learn, followed by Portuguese and finally French.
The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
The Korean language is much more related to Chinese than one might think. Korean is also very closely related to Japanese, probably even more than Chinese, but Chinese words actually make up about 60% of the Korean vocabulary, though in actual speech (especially informally) native Korean words are more common.
Which language is easier to learn– Korean or Japanese? Korean is considered to be much easier than Japanese. There are more letters in the Japanese alphabet than in Korean. Japanese also contains more complicated Chinese characters and difficult grammar.
이름이 뭐예요? (ireumi mwoeyo?)
This is a common and less formal way of saying “What is your name?” You can safely use this phrase with people you meet for the first time, as it is still formal enough to be and sound respectful.
However, considering the larger number of sounds and the different particles in Korean, Japanese is definitely the easier language to start in. If you're not good at distinguishing new sounds and pronunciations, you're definitely going to have a hard time with Korean.
Men learn to use an authoritative falling tone; in Korean culture, a deeper voice is associated with being more polite. In addition to the deferential speech endings being used, men are seen as more polite as well as impartial, and professional.
In the Korean language, South Korea is called Daehan Min-guk ( 대한민국 listen , 大韓民國, literally "Great People's Nation"), or Hanguk for short (한국, "Han Nation," usually referring to Korea as a whole) or Namhan (남한, "South Han", referring to South Korea specifically).